Good news today for bloggers like us here at Language Log Plaza: the California Supreme Court has struck another blow against common law liability for republication. You can't be sued for libel (they claim) simply for reporting on a blog what another source has said (see this report). Ilena Rosenthal had been sued for publishing, on a web site she did not control, certain statements taken from an email by Tim Bolen about a couple of medical doctors, Stephen Barrett and Terry Polevoy, who run a web site that attacks alternative medicine (Rosenthal is a defender of alternative medicine). Among other things, she alleged that Barrett is "arrogant, bizarre, closed-minded; emotionally disturbed, professionally incompetent, intellectually dishonest, a dishonest journalist, sleazy, unethical, a quack, a thug, a bully, a Nazi, a hired gun for vested interests, the leader of a subversive organization, and engaged in criminal activity (conspiracy, extortion, filing a false police report, and other unspecified acts)".
What we learn from the Supreme Court's judgment is not just that she can't be sued for libel for reporting those judgments about Barrett in another forum, but also that I can't be sued for letting you know what she said. I suppose it could conceivably still be actionable for me to tell you that Strunk and White are dishonest, closed-minded, emotionally disturbed, professionally incompetent, unethical, fanatical, ignorant, linguistic charlatans and puppy torturers, because I'd be the primary utterer of that claim, not just a reporter of it. But hey, they're dead.
What's most important is that I would definitely be free to cite the phrase emotionally disturbed, professionally incompetent, intellectually dishonest, a dishonest journalist, sleazy, unethical, a quack, a thug, a bully, a Nazi, a hired gun for vested interests, the leader of a subversive organization, and engaged in criminal activity as an attested example of a 13-part coordination in which the coordinates are not all of the same grammatical category (the 13 coordinates are adjective phrase, adjective phrase, adjective phrase, noun phrase, adjective, adjective, noun phrase, noun phrase, noun phrase, noun phrase, noun phrase, noun phrase, and past participial verb phrase, respectively). And I could link to the source. The court has made the world safer for data, which is what we care about here at Language Log.
Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at November 21, 2006 09:38 PM