A scientist’s statement impugning the veracity and accuracy of a colleague’s research is privileged and not actionable, a federal appeals court has ruled.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the dismissal of a suit against Daniel F. Klessig, a senior scientist at Cornell University in Ithica, N.Y., finding that Mr. Klessig’s statements about the research done by his former associate fell within conditional privileges for matters on which he had a “legal or moral obligation to speak” or for statements “among communicants who share a common interest.”
