#4 After wading through the double and triple negatives involved in the court's finding, I found the 100 page opinion to be a useful discussion of the issues and law involved in considering whether an article or blog could be construed as actionable defamation. As such, it may be worth the time of any site owner or moderater.
While the National Review is off the hook for its editorial on the lawsuit, that is certainly not the case for the Simberg and Stein articles. The case will be tried. They will have to defend their defamatory allegations of scientific misconduct. Good luck, but it doesn't look good, in my opinion.
The opinion concludes, "Dr. Mann has supplied sufficient evidence for a reasonable jury to find, by a preponderance of the evidence, that statements in the articles written by Mr. Simberg and Mr. Steyn were false, defamatory, and published by appellants to third parties, and, by clear and convincing evidence, that appellants did so with actual malice." |