Supreme Court allows Penn State professor's defamation suit against National Review

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court refused on Monday to shield two conservative writers from being sued for defamation by a climate-change expert whom they accused of having “molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science.”

Over a dissent by Justice Samuel A. Alito, the high court cleared the way for Penn State professor Michael Mann to sue National Review and the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute for having compared him to the former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky, who was imprisoned for sexual abuse. Both had been investigated by the university.

In his 2012 article, columnist Mark Steyn said that in Mann’s case, as with Sandusky and football legend Joe Paterno, who was also involved in the sex-abuse scandal, Penn State “declined to find one of its star names guilty of any wrongdoing.” His comment repeated the words of an online columnist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who first made the comparison between Mann and Sandusky.

The case involves a hotly disputed question that has split lower courts: When can statements of opinion form the basis of a libel suit? Ordinarily, the high court has ruled, a person can’t be sued for expressing an opinion. But when a statement mixes opinion with a claim about facts — in this case, the claim that Mann had misused data — courts have struggled to decide whether lawsuits are valid.

Read more: https://triblive.com/news/politics-election/supreme-court-allows-penn-state-professors-defamation-suit-against-national-review/
(Pittsburgh Tribune Review)