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James M. Schatz v. Republican State Leadership Committee; Republican State Leadership

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Before Lynch, Chief Judge, Howard and Thompson, Circuit Judges.

PROLOGUE

Campaigning for public office sometimes has the feel of a contact sport, with candidates, political organizations, and others trading rhetorical jabs and sound-bite attacks in hopes of landing a knock-out blow at the polls. It is not for the thin-skinned or the faint-hearted, to use two apropos cliches. See Monitor Patriot Co. v. Roy, 401 U.S. 265, 275-76 (1971). And because political speech is the life-breath of democracy, see Eu v. S.F. Cnty. Democratic Cent. Comm., 489 U.S. 214, 223 (1989), the First Amendment – applied to the states via the Fourteenth – bars public figures from recovering damages under state defamation laws unless they show that the defamer acted with “actual malice,” see New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 279-80 (1964), legalese that might suggest ill will or evil motive to the uninitiated but really means knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth, see Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc., 501 U.S. 496, 509-11 (1991).*fn1 Cases define “reckless disregard” variously as a defamer’s having “‘serious doubts’” about a statement’s falsity, or “actually” having “a ‘high degree of awareness of . . . probable falsity,’” or suspecting falsity and purposefully – not just negligently – avoiding the truth. Harte-Hanks Commc’n, Inc. v. Connaughton, 491 U.S. 657, 688, 692 (1989) (quoting St. Amant v. Thompson, 390 U.S. 727, 731 (1968), and Garrison v. Louisiana, 379 U.S. 64, 74 (1964), respectively).

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