Court Opinion

ID: 9472948
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 04:15:27.295847+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:43:14.470122
License: Public Domain

MacKINNON, Senior Circuit Judge
(concurring):
Bertell Oilman is a political scientist who, inter alia, was an associate professor *1011teaching Marxism at New York University. His attitudes toward Marxism and Ms manner of teacMng are fully described in the accompanying opinions by Judges Bork and Starr, so they will not be repeated here. Suffice it to say that Oilman’s expressed attitude toward teaching Marxism to college students raised considerable controversy among many teachers of political science and others throughout the nation. In 1978 Oilman applied to the University of Maryland for the post of Chairman of the department of politics and government.
The University of Maryland is established as a public university and constitutes a “state agency.” Md.Educ.Code Ann. § 13-101 (1978). The government of the University is vested in a Board of Regents consisting of 15 members. Except for the State’s Secretary of Agriculture, its Regents are all appointed by the Governor with the advice and consent of the Maryland Senate. Id. § 13-102. The University is tax-supported, receiving very substantial sums of money for its maintenance and operation in the form of appropriations from the Maryland Legislature.
Oilman’s application was approved by a search committee of the department of government and politics at the University, and that committee nominated him to head that department. His nomination was approved by the Provost of the University and the Chancellor of the main campus of the University. When these facts became public, an intense public controversy arose over the propriety of appointing Oilman to head the political science department of a public university supported by tax payers’ money. This discussion raised many issues that can only be described as political in nature. The most obvious of these was whether members of the public, which necessarily included tax paying citizens of Maryland whose sons and daughters attended the University, should support the appointment of a professor who taught Marxism as Oilman did to lead the political science department that was supposed to instruct their children in government. The faculty and president of the University may have had other questions about Oilman’s competence. The public, however, was concerned about his teaching objectives and methods.
At this juncture, the Evans and Novak column appeared. The article is set forth as an appendix to Judge Starr’s opinion so one can judge it in its entirety. For those interested in knowing the outcome of this controversy, it is a fact of wide public knowledge that the president of the University ultimately refused to approve Oilman’s appointment.1
In due time Oilman sued Evans and Novak for libel. The complaint alleges that five statements about him in the Evans and Novak column of May 4, 1978, were false and defamatory (J.A. 7). It is clear to me *1012that four of the five statements are constitutionally protected as expressions of opinion for reasons generally agreed upon by the court as stated in our other opinions herewith. The discussion in this opinion is thus limited to the fifth statement in the article which stated that “Oilman has no status within the profession but is a pure and simple activist.”2 When this case was before the original panel, I dissented from the majority opinion which held that this statement constituted actionable defamation. My stated reasons are set forth generally in the margin hereof.3 This opinion sets forth reasons in addition to those in my panel dissent as to why the statement in question must be regarded as an expression of opinion.
It is crystal clear that Evans’ and Novak’s article was directed at the public political discussion that surrounded Oilman’s nomination and that it must be judged under the rule early announced by Judge (later Justice) Lurton and adopted in Washington Post Co. v. Chaloner, 250 U.S. 290, 293, 39 S.Ct. 448, 63 L.Ed. 987 (1819), that “a publication claimed to be defamatory must be read and construed in the sense in which the readers to whom it is addressed would ordinarily understand it. So the whole item ... should be read and construed together, and its meaning and significance thus determined.” (Emphasis added.) A California appellate court elaborated on this principle in Desert Sun Pub. Co. v. Superior Court, Etc., 158 Cal.Rptr. 519, 521, 97 Cal.App.3d 49 (1979): “A political publication may not be dissected and judged word for word or phrase by phrase. The entire publication must be examined.” The statement in question here was directed to and uttered in a public controversy that went far beyond Oilman’s merely academic credentials and related to matters of great public political interest.
Here we must focus on the sense in which the controversy ignited by Oilman’s nomination was political. Here is a professor who has committed himself publicly to using the university as a means to promote the Marxist agenda. Here also is a university, an arm of a constitutional government, which is dedicated, among other things, to educating its citizens in the principles of politics. Oilman’s nomination thus must inevitably have raised in the public’s mind questions about the mission of a public university, the scope of academic freedom, and the responsibilities, if any, of public universities and the political science profession in a society like ours dedicated not only to free debate, but to preserving the institutions that make free debate possible. Little wonder that some must have thought, like Florence Nightingale did of hospitals and disease, that while a political science department might want to study Marxism, it should not promote it. Others equally must have held that a public university must tolerate even the advocacy *1013of a political science opposed to public values. It was in the midst of a fray that must have inspired many political arguments that Evans and Novak made a small contribution: They reported that an unidentified liberal political science professor had stated Oilman had “no status” in his profession. How would those participating in or following the debate described above interpret this report? This is essentially the test Washington Post Co. instructs us to employ.
There can be no doubt that in the context of heated political debate, Evans’ and Novak’s article would have been taken by the readers to whom it was addressed as a statement of political opinion. To understand why this is so, we need to appreciate the special nature of political discussion, and how it differs from disputes that can be settled by mere reference to a survey or an almanac.
Discussions about fundamental political issues, such as academic freedom and public universities, take one into the realm of contested concepts. Here opposing sides may disagree not only about what policy they would prefer to see enacted; they disagree even about the meanings of words. Words such as “freedom,” “liberty,” “education,” and others are used in arguments about basic political issues in a manner very different from the way that they are used in less controversial contexts. “Status,” the word on whose meaning this case turns, is just the sort of word that in a political controversy like that over Oilman may mean something quite different to each faction or person who uses it. In these politically controversial settings, the average reader would treat statements that rely on words like “status” to convey their sense as statements of opinion.
In fact, words like “status” are used to express approval in a way that gives mere opinion a superficial air of scientific truth. Yet efforts to measure such magnitudes quantitatively are as misconceived as trying to measure class, clout or charisma. If one says someone has “class,” for example, it sounds like one means someone has some measurable quantity of an enviable personal property. It is impossible of course to attach a precise meaning to “no class,” or “no status” (or little or much) unless we first determine what “class” or “status” is. But if most people say Mr. X has no class, does that mean he is a boor, or that most people have bad taste? In fact, such statements merely express one’s admiration or contempt for something about the person. As to what that something is, everyone would, if pressed, produce their own definition. “Class,” like “status,” is one of those properties that is ascribed to a person in a statement that sounds like it asserts a fact when it only asserts an opinion. This is partly because such statements are unverifiable, and the ease law on the fact-opinion dichotomy in libel law emphasizes this central requirement that to be libelous, a statement must be verifiable. Hotchner v. Castillo-Puche, 551 F.2d 910, 913 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 434 U.S. 834, 98 S.Ct. 120, 54 L.Ed.2d 95 (1977).4 This point, however, is only half of the story. What is central here is why a claim that someone has little or no “status” is unverifiable in a politically controversial context. It is unverifiable because whatever method one chooses to measure “status” and other “quantities” of its ilk, one must commit oneself to some politically controversial view about what that so-called quantity really consists of. Choosing a method, a survey for example, settles nothing; it merely shifts the political debate from whether a person has “status,” or some other such quality, to how best to measure it.
This essential contestability of the meanings of some words used in political controversy is not a problem that can be solved by simply taking a survey, or some other ad hoc means of definition. Even if a libel plaintiff took such a survey, a court would still have to instruct a jury on how to interpret that evidence. It would therefore have to have a theory about what *1014status really is, or what the word “status” really means. One opinion here suggests such a theory: a political scientist has no or little status, it states, if a decisive majority of his peers respond in a scientifically conducted survey (poll) that the political scientist in question is not a good political scientist. But is that really what it means to have or not to have status? Suppose a very small, secretive minority of the professor’s peers revere him as a pioneer and admires him all the more because the majority, unable to appreciate his genius, holds him in contempt? By the test the suggested poll would impose, that professor, it seems, would have little status. But suppose that small minority is called the Faculty Appointments Committee of the Department of Government, Harvard University? Does the opinion of those three persons suddenly give our professor “status,” thus trumping the view of the decisive majority? Does the same conclusion apply if the minority is the equivalent committee at the University of Paris, the University of Moscow, or West Point? It seems wrong to say authoritatively that such a man has “no status,” or “low to moderate status,” though that is precisely the result our hypothetical survey would yield. Indeed, it would be especially ironic to use a test that equated status with popularity among one’s peers in a profession whose universally acknowledged founder lost a similar popularity contest, and probably would have lost it much worse than he did if only his fellow political theorists had been polled. See Plato, The Trial and Death of Socrates (G.M. Grube, trans. 1975). While one could suggest weighting votes for intensity of admiration or contempt, or for the status of the voter, to rehabilitate the survey, it is easy to see that efforts like these would only succeed in begging the question. One cannot know how to reform the survey unless one knows what it is the survey is supposed to measure. Unless, of course, this definition of “status” as survey results is meant to be self-evidently valid. If that is the suggestion, it falls far short of convincing.
The suggested poll presupposes that out of the aggregation of the opinions of the country’s political scientists, one can get a verifiable fact, an objective measure of Oilman’s status. But if each political scientist polled is just expressing his opinion, why should we expect the aggregation of all this opinion to be transformed somehow into a fact? The resultant numbers constitute a fact, but the result does not determine “status” because of the unverifiable and essentially contestable interpretations that those voting in the poll, and those who might rely upon it, might give to the term “status.” The methodology of the poll suggests, however, that we would not even inquire into the reasons the various respondents to the survey might have for answering as they might. Their evaluations might be stupid, but in the survey method of defining “status,” this is supposed not to bother us. The reason for this could only be that we have already decided that status just is the result of a poll like that recommended by the opinion survey method. But this answer shares the circular fallacy of Professor Binet’s legendary reply to the question “What is intelligence?” in the so-called IQ controversy: “It is what my test measures.” In fact, of course, there is no agreement as to just what standards should be used to evaluate the professional status of an educator, or a lawyer, doctor or any other professional for that matter.
As the Second Circuit recently noted in an opinion by Judge Winter, “the number of relevant variables [in evaluating teachers] is great and there is no common unit of measure by which to judge scholarship.” Zahorik v. Cornell University, 729 F.2d 85, 93 (2d Cir.1984) (judicial review of university tenure decisions). Disagreements even among members of the same faculty as to the qualifications of individuals “may reflect long standing and heated disagreement as to the merits of contending schools of thought.” Id. This is all the more true where the internecine feuds of political scientists converge with the wider political debates in which the public takes part. To resort to a survey of a profession ridden with political strife in the hopes of settling *1015the meaning of an ambiguous term itself used in the course of another heated political debate evinces an almost quixotic faith in the power of the techniques of social science. Evaluations of personal or professional status, however, are so inherently subjective that I do not believe that they can in general be considered statements of fact. A social scientist might plausibly design a survey to measure what he or she decides to call “status” for the purposes of a particular study. But to suggest that these poll results are what the reader takes the world “status” to mean when used in a political debate is unreasonable.
This perspective, it should be noted, is not at all at odds with the traditional trust the law of libel places in the jury to make determinations about such matters as a plaintiff’s reputation in his or her community. See Partial Dissent of Judge Wald at 1-2. The way a word such as “reputation” is used in a court of law may be quite different from how it is used in the heat of a political debate. Courts and legislatures are in the business of giving words special and, one hopes, precise definitions and creating rules of evidence that in part determine what certain legal words mean. These words are used for particular purposes that are often quite different from the use a layman would make of them, especially during a political argument. That juries, with the help of judges and lawyers, apply legal concepts to particular facts in the special context of a trial may, from a logical point of view, have nothing to do with what people mean in ordinary affairs when they use some word or term. To compare evidence a jury could receive about reputation and the suggested survey confuses the competence of juries to use some specially defined term once it is given to them with the appropriateness of giving them a particular definition in the first place, here of what “status” meant in a political argument.
My view does not suggest that all terms and concepts become meaningless in the context of a political debate. There is indeed no suggestion here that “status” is meaningless. Rather, the argument here is that its meaning is variable, unverifiable, controversial, a matter of opinion, whom you listen to, and whose side you are on, among other things. The word does not have a “precise core of meaning.” Political debate is rife with such richly if unquantifiably meaningful terms, as a moment’s reflection will show. This is to be expected. Facts have a status that opinions do not, and dressing the latter up as the former may serve legitimate political purposes, just as hyperbole may.
There is another reason the approach of the suggested poll is mistaken. A rule of law which took the vast category of words often used in political debate to make seemingly factual but in fact value-laden statements and translated them into the verifiable quantities of social science would be a pernicious step in a dangerous direction. It would not only inhibit the rough and tumble of political debate, as Judge Bork so persuasively argues. It would do so in a very unsettling way. If the proposed poll is taken as illustrative, under such a rule judges would presumably arm juries with some of the more dubious techniques of modern social science and instruct them to translate essentially contested political terms into measurable quantities so they could decide whether a controversial remark was defamatory. How could participants in political debate respond to this rule except by trying to cleanse their talk of those terms, like “status,” that suggest some factual content (though no one can say authoritatively what that content is) but assert political values as well? In place of those terms, those who enter the political arena would be well advised to substitute a paler lingo that tries to keep facts and opinions discrete, as does the vocabulary invented by the social scientists. Such a development would tend to impoverish perhaps the most important prerequisite of free political discussion: the language of ideas in which we conduct it.
The analysis above argues that statements which rely for their meaning on essentially contested concepts, as those used in political debates frequently do, cannot *1016state the sort of facts necessary to support an action at libel. Judge Starr’s scholarly opinion sets out a four factor test to distinguish facts and opinion sets out a four factor test to distinguish facts and opinions that emphasizes the common usage or meaning of the challenged statement, whether the statement is verifiable, the context in which the statement is made, and the broader social context into which the statement fits. Judge Starr then applies this test to Oilman’s five claims, including the prickly fifth claim, in a manner in which we concur. These factors are undoubtedly the most important in determining whether a statement is an actionable libel. They are consistent with the approach of this opinion, but it is important these factors not be taken mechanically, but as a way to analyze the “totality of the circumstances.” Here Judge Bork’s skillful employment of “the concept of a public, political arena” is crucial to a proper understanding of the analysis Judge Starr elucidates. With the qualification that Judge Bork’s stress throughout his opinion on the special nature of the “first amendment arena” is necessary to a proper understanding of Judge Starr’s analysis, I concur generally with the opinions of Judges Bork and Starr.

. The New York Times of July 31, 1978, p. A14 reported the result as follows:

Job Offer to Professor is Dropped

The nomination of a Marxist associate professor at New York University to head the department of government and politics at the University of Maryland was withdrawn yesterday, stirring further controversy over a proposed appointment that had become a major issue in the Maryland gubernatorial campaign.
Prof. Bertell Oilman, who had been selected over 100 other candidates last March for the departmental chairmanship at the College Park campus, was notified yesterday that Dr. John Toll, the president of the University of Maryland, had rejected the appointment on the ground that Mr. Oilman was not "the best qualified person we can reasonably hope to get.”
Dr. Toll, who announced his decision in a statement to the Maryland Board of Regents in College Park yesterday morning, said the rejection had nothing to do with the candidate’s personal opinions or political beliefs. But Professor Oilman later disputed this and said he would fight for the job by filing a lawsuit charging that he had been denied the post because of his political beliefs.
"There are still some people who believe in Santa Claus,” the 43-year old professor said in an interview, "and these people may just believe that President Toll has rejected my appointment for the reason that he gives. But everybody else will know that the reasons that I’ve been rejected have to do with my political beliefs and that I am the latest victim of political repression, American style.”

. See Appendix to opinion of Judge Starr.

. My dissent to the panel opinion was based on the ground that the content of this nationally syndicated article should be judged in its entirety and not in disjointed fragments and that the panel should have given more consideration to the circumstances under which the statement was published. My dissent also pointed to the significance of the fact that this article appeared on the opinion-editorial page of the Washington Post:
If, as I suspect and as is customary, the article appeared on the opinion-editorial page, generally known in the trade as the op-ed page, that circumstance would be very relevant to the district court's determination. Newspaper readers are likely to assume that articles appearing on the op-ed page, especially nationally syndicated editorial comments, in contrast to news articles which traditionally appear elsewhere in the newspaper, are intended to express specific opinions. It is also customary for the newspaper to limit the space available for syndicated columnists to express their editorial opinions. This requires that their views be presented in very condensed form. The primary focus of such articles is opinion and they are generally so understood. Under these circumstances, readers of the opinions of nationally syndicated columnists are less likely to be misled by the omission of some facts that persons named in such articles might consider to be necessary.
This reference to the op-ed placement of the article is entitled to considerable significance in determining whether the statement is protected expression, as others note.

. It is understandable that those in academia might lean toward believing that status in the teaching profession could be measured and verified.