The Public Figure Doctrine and Professionals Thi

This paper will examine the development of the public figure doctrine in defamation cases and discuss the application of this doctrine to professionals, particularly attorneys and teachers. The first part of the paper will focus upon the historical development of the public figure doctrine, looking at the evolution of the doctrine in the U.S. Supreme Court. The second part of the paper will examine how lower courts have handled the doctrine, particularly in light of the vagueness of the Supreme Court's guidelines. The third part of the paper will discuss how the doctrine has been applied in cases involving professionals. This section will especially address the question of whether a professional is more likely than another person to be considered a public figure.

The Historical Development of the Public Figure Doctrine

The issue of whether a defendant is a public figure did not arise until the middle years of the 1960s. Until that time, plaintiffs only had to prove that false statements were published which subjected them to hatred, contempt, or ridicule. The Supreme Court changed this in 1964, when it handed down the New York Times v. Sullivan decision. This case involved a New York Times editorial advertisement accusing the Montgomery, Alabama, police department of acts of racial hatred. The police commissioner, Sullivan, sued for defamation and was awarded substantial damages by the state court. The Times appeale

. . .
n in this regard was that the defamatory statements concerned not the contempt conviction but allegations that the plaintiff was a Soviet spy. Lower Court Decisions Since the Supreme court has been so vague in its treatment of the public figure issue, much of the law in this area has been formulated by lower courts. The problem with this is that the resulting law is not uniform. The courts have agreed on a general four-step analysis. First, the controversy must be isolated and the scope of the public's interest must be determined. Second, the plaintiff's role in the controversy must be examined. Third, it must be determined whether the defamatory statement is germane to the plaintiff's role in the controversy. Fourth, the extent of the plaintiff's access to channels of media communications must be analyzed. While the lower courts have agreed upon the above structure for analyzing public figure cases, they have not agreed upon the standards to be used in this analytical structure. For instance, they differ over the standards to be used in determining whether public controversies are present in particular defamation cases. More precisely, they disagree whether they should make the determination that an underlying disp
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Supreme Court, Democratic Party, Soviet Union, Decisions Supreme, Supreme Court's, Gertz Critics, Status Professionals, West Virginia, Senator Proxmire, public figure, Nova University, public controversy, court held, supreme court, figure status, public figures, public figure status, role controversy, lower courts, public controversies, public figure doctrine, figure doctrine, plaintiff's role controversy, plaintiff public figure, germane plaintiff's role,
Approximate Word count = 4511
Approximate Pages = 18 (250 words per page)