Seropian v. Forman’s Empirical Analysis
1995
Citation profile
10 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 14 later decisions — most recently June 2010
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. · Bose Corp. v. Consumers Union of United States, Inc. · St. Amant v. Thompson · Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts
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 14 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Similarly, no reader of these letters could seriously have believed that plaintiff was being charged with receiving a bribe of “unlawful compensation” to endorse the Clime’s position.... Thus, even assuming that the term influence peddler was directed to plaintiff, it could only have been reasonably understood to be “rhetorical hyperbole, a vigorous epithet,” used by a doctor and chief of staff who thought those arguments “extremely unreasonable.” Quite apart from the legal construction of the term influence peddling, we can find absolutely no evidence of knowing falsity or reckless disregard of the truth.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrencee.g. Zorc v. Jordan“It thus appears that under the present state of the law concerning an action for libel by a public official, the plaintiff has the burden of showing by clear and convincing evidence that the defamatory statement was (1) a statement of fact, (2) which was false, and (3) made with ‘actual malice’ — that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Zorc v. Jordan“the scope of review on appeal is highly unusual and essentially does away with the notion that the appellate court will defer- to the factfinder’s application of law to facts ... [Instead], an appellate court is required to conduct its own independent review of the evidence and determine for itself whether the evidence is sufficient to meet the exacting requirements of the First Amendment.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Zorc v. Jordan
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.