Judge Rakoff Declines to Reconsider Judgment Against Sarah Palin in Her Suit Against N.Y. Times

I'm on the run and can't discuss this in detail, but I thought that I'd link to it (Palin v. N.Y. Times Co.) and excerpt the opening:

Now before the Court is plaintiff Sarah Palin's post-trial motion. She first seeks the Court's retroactive disqualification, arguing that various aspects of the Court's management of her libel trial suggest bias against her. In the alternative, she seeks either a new trial or reconsideration of the Court's prior ruling that entered final judgment in favor of defendants The New York Times Company and James Bennet based on their motion under Fed. R. Civ. P. 50 for judgment as a matter of law. Because Palin's instant motion is wholly lacking in merit, the Court denies it in full.

Whatever she may have claimed in her complaint and pre-trial submissions, Palin was unable to deliver at trial admissible evidence that remotely supported her claim that she was intentionally or recklessly defamed by the defendants. As the Court clearly explained at some length in its Rule 50 Opinion dated March 1, 2022, which is re-adopted here by reference, Palin wholly failed to establish several essential elements of her claim.

Among other things, in the end she offered no affirmative evidence that Bennet or others who worked on the Editorial that is the subject of her claim knew or suspected before publication that the Challenged Statements, which linked Palin's Crosshairs Map to the Arizona shootings of Representative Gabby Giffords and others, were false. Indeed, none of the sources or research upon which the Editorial Board relied to draft, revise, and publish the July 14, 2017 Editorial expressly denied Bennet's inference that Palin's Crosshairs Map had played a causal role in the Arizona shooting. And when cautionary information was brought to defendants' attention, the Times promptly retracted the Challenged Statements. No reasonable juror could therefore have found by clear and convincing evidence that Bennet and the Times published the Challenged Statements with actual malice.

Comments

[DaivdBehar]

Rakoff, Ivy indoctrinated. Democrat appointed. Just guessing.

[DaivdBehar]

Was this decision made before or after lunch. All judicial decisions are invalid garbage. They are biases, whims, getting up on the wrong side of the bed, hanger, and imposing the political agenda of Ivy indoctrinated garbage people. They have zero external reliability, certainly no validation.

[DaivdBehar]

Good point at which to kill the Texas shooter but for the protection of the scumbag lawyer profession.

https://nypost.com/2022/05/30/new-video-shows-texas-school-shooter-salvador-ramos-holding-bag-of-dead-cats/

[JR]

Is the judge applying the right standard for recklessness? He says that Palin failed to produce evidence that the NYT "knew or suspected" falsity. But I believe that in many other instances recklessness includes "should have known," which is a lower bar. I have no idea about the particular law at issue here, however.

[David Nieporent]

No; should have known is negligence, and the caselaw is 1,000% clear that negligence is not sufficient to constitute actual malice.

[Bored Lawyer]

You are correct. Even gross negligence is not enough. (Though it should be, IMO.)
One important caveat, however, is that one does not need direct evidence to prove recklessness, it can be circumstantial evidence. Which might include gross negligence. (There is an old precedent from Cardozo where he makes the same point about fraud, and has a line that gross negligence may raise an inference of fraud.) At some point, when a usually competent person acts with extreme sloppiness, the trier of fact can infer that what was really happening is that he suspected that he would not get the answer he wanted if he looked carefully, so he didn't.
I don't know the record enough here to say whether that argument could be made. But IMO it was foolish of Rakoff to grant this motion and not let it go to the jury. If he is reversed, then they will need a whole new trial.

[not guilty]

Uh, Judge Rakoff did let the case go to the jury.