Tocco v. Time, Inc.’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

3 federal appellate · 3 state decisions

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 11 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““An action for libel ‘accrues’ when the allegedly defamatory matter is ‘published.’ Ogden v. Association of United States Army, D.C. D.C.1959, 177 F.Supp. 498 . The entire distribution of the allegedly libelous article may be viewed as one over-all ‘publication,’ resulting in a single cause of action, or the printing and sale of each copy could be considered a separate ‘publication,’ resulting in a multitude of causes of action, some of which are not barred by the one-year statute of limitations. The former concept, establishing a single cause of action, is known as the ‘single publication’ rule, the latter, the ‘multiple publication’ rule. “Although sometimes designated the common law rule, the ‘multiple publication’ doctrine was first set forth in a civil libel case in Duke of Brunswick v. Harmer, 14 Q.B. 185, 117 Eng.Rep. 75 (1849). In that action, a single sale of a newspaper from the offices of the defendant to an agent of the plaintiff seventeen years subsequent to the date of issuance of the newspaper was held to be a ‘publication,’ thereby precluding the barring of the action under the prevailing six-year statute of limitations. No rationale was given for the holding, and, indeed, the only raison d’etre for the rule, apart from historical reasons, is that it prevents a malicious publisher from printing a minimum number of copies of a defamatory matter to allow the statute of limitations to commence, withholding the bulk until the statute has run its course, and then c”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Akin v. Time, Inc.