Ryan v. Brooks’s Empirical Analysis
634 F.2d 726 · 1980
Citation profile
17 federal appellate · 4 district · 10 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 41 later decisions — most recently February 2023 · most notably Strada v. Connecticut Newspapers, Inc. (1984), Lawrence v. Bauer Publishing & Printing Ltd. (1982)
17 federal appellate · 4 district · 10 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on New York Times Co. v. Sullivan · Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. · St. Amant v. Thompson · Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts · Garrison v. State of Louisiana
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 41 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[R]eckless conduct is not measured by whether a reasonably prudent man would have published, or would have investigated before publishing. There must be sufficient evidence to permit the conclusion that the defendant in fact entertained serious doubts as to the truth of his publication. Publishing with such doubts shows reckless disregard for truth or falsity and demonstrates actual malice. [ 390 U.S. at 731 , 88 S.Ct. at 1325 , 20 L.Ed.2d at 267 .] 4”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“[W]e think the evidence in this case was insufficient to bring John Brooks' actions within those outer limits of reckless conduct marked out in Supreme Court cases. Assuming that the use of the words "extortion" and "false vouchers" rendered the sentence false and defamatory, there is clearly no evidence that Brooks knew they were false. The only question is whether he actually doubted their accuracy but left them unchanged, without further investigation. There is nothing in the record to indicate that Brooks had any such doubts. He relied on two secondary sources which he had used in the past and which have an excellent reputation. He had no reason to doubt the accuracy of their accounts of Ryan's Observer interview. The reliability of the third source, the internal Management Report of AT & T, is more questionable, but Brooks used nothing from it that was not also found in his other sources. It simply served to corroborate the existence of the false vouchering system reported in Business Week . Even if the three sources together should have tipped Brooks to the existence of a dispute between Ryan and Southern Bell executives, as Ryan argues they must have, he would still have no reason to suspect that the Times and Business Week had not reported Ryan's statements accurately. Clearly it would have been better journalistic practice to have verified the accuracy of these secondary sources by reading the original account in the Charlotte Observer . But we cannot say that the fa”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“the recklessness in publishing material of obviously doubtful veracity must approach the level of publishing a `knowing, calculated falsehood.'”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.