Partington v. Bugliosi

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• concluding that statements are protected when, “read in context, they are not statements implying the assertion of objective facts but are instead interpretations of the facts available to both the writer and the reader”
• holding that where the context in which the statement at issue was made is sufficient to demonstrate that the statement is constitutionally protected, the fact that the statement itself cannot be proven true or false is an additional basis for dismissing the defamation action
• observing that “fake,” “phony,” “hefty mark-up,” and “unfair” are too subjective or unprovable to be actionable
• “rhetorical hyperbole” and “imaginative expression” enlivens writers’ prose and is protected by the first amendment
• \[R]obust debate among people with different viewpoints * * * is a vital part of our democracy * * *.\
• “[N]egative statements concerning a lawyer’s performance during-trial, even if made explicitly, are generally not actionable since they are not ordinarily ‘susceptible of being proved true or false.’”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).