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Federal Appeals Court Rejects Suit Over U. Of Minnesota Website

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  • Federal Appeals Court Rejects Suit Over U. Of Minnesota Website

    FEDERAL APPEALS COURT REJECTS SUIT OVER U. OF MINNESOTA WEBSITE
    Scott Jaschik

    http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/04/federal-appeals-court-rejects
    May 4, 2012

    A federal appeals court ruled Thursday [1] that the University of
    Minnesota could not be sued because the website of one of its research
    centers had labeled another website "unreliable."

    The statements made by the University of Minnesota website were
    protected legally -- either by being true or by being opinion -- said
    the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. The
    website that prompted the suit is run by the Center for Holocaust
    and Genocide Studies at Minnesota. Scholars there, consistent with
    the consensus view of historians of genocide, include the slaughter
    of Armenians during World War I as a case of genocide. The suit
    challenged the right of the center to label as "unreliable" a website
    of the Turkish Coalition of America that cast doubt on whether the
    Armenians experienced a genocide.

    Not surprisingly, the case has been closely followed by historians of
    that period in history. But the case has also been tracked by scholars
    concerned about academic freedom generally, some of whom worried that a
    dangerous precedent could have been set by a suit against an academic
    center for expressing its views on areas of scholarship. The Middle
    East Studies Association, for example, has called [2]on the Turkish
    Coalition of American to withdraw the suit.

    "We fear that legal action of this kind may have a chilling effect
    on the ability of scholars and academic institutions to carry out
    their work freely and to have their work assessed on its merits,
    in conformity with standards and procedures long established in the
    world of scholarship," said a statement from the group.

    An irony of the case is that the label of "unreliable" was removed from
    the Minnesota website -- at about the time the Turkish coalition was
    criticizing it but before the suit was filed in 2010. [3] Minnesota
    officials said that they didn't want to send anyone to the websites
    that cast doubt on the Armenian genocide, so they removed the list
    of "unreliable" websites from a webpage with teaching and research
    links. However, the university has defended the right of the research
    center to have had the list up in the first place, and most of the
    appeals court decision is written as if Minnesota still had such
    a link.

    Last year, a federal district court ruled that academic freedom
    protected the Minnesota website, [4] but the Turkish coalition
    appealed, setting up Thursday's ruling.

    The appeals court rejected arguments in the appeal by the Turkish
    coalition that the university violated its First Amendment rights and
    defamed it by identifying the coalition's website as unreliable. A
    central argument by the coalition was that students at the university
    would be denied access to the coalition's ideas, and thus that the free
    exchange of ideas was hindered when a center at a public university
    labeled the website unreliable.

    On the First Amendment issue, the Turkish coalition cited court rulings
    in which, for example, secondary schools were found to be violating
    First Amendment rights of students by removing certain books from
    the library. The appeals court noted that those cases were based on
    blocking access to information -- something that the court said the
    University of Minnesota never did.

    "There is no allegation that the defendants impaired students' access
    to the TCA website on a university-provided Internet system," the
    appeals court's decision says. "There is no hint in the complaint
    that university students were not free to, for example, read the
    TCA website, e-mail material from the TCA website to their friends,
    regale passers-by on the sidewalk with quotes from the TCA website,
    and so forth. In short, TCA's website was not 'removed' from the
    university in any sense."

    The Turkish coalition's appeal argued that the Minnesota website
    defamed the coalition by saying it engages in "denial" of the Armenian
    genocide, by calling it "unreliable," by saying that it features a
    "strange mix of fact and opinion," and that it is "an illegitimate
    source of information."

    The coalition argued that by labeling its website a "denial" website,
    the Minnesota center was maligning it because the term "denial," in the
    context of the study of genocide, "implies denial of well-documented
    underlying facts associated with a genocidal event."

    The appeals court ruling, however, says that the issue here is whether
    the coalition denies the Armenian genocide. "Because the TCA website
    does, in fact, state that it is 'highly unlikely that a genocide charge
    could be sustained against the Ottoman government or its successor'
    based on the historical evidence, the center's statement under this
    interpretation is true and, thus, still not actionable," the appeals
    court decision says.

    "The remaining three statements can be interpreted reasonably only as
    subjective opinions, rather than facts," the opinion adds, rejecting
    the defamation charges there as well.

    A lawyer for the Turkish coalition did not respond to a request
    for comment.

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