Walter Olson: Sued for a Study

A
plaintiff’s lawyer is suing a medical journal and two doctors
because they published a case report that makes it harder to win
birth-injury lawsuits. A Boston lawyer who claims to have debunked
the case study has sued its two authors and the journal’s publisher
for publishing and refusing to retract the article. A trial court
dismissed the case, writes Walter Olson, but it’s now on appeal,
with defense lawyers arguing that if there are weaknesses in the
article the remedy for plaintiffs is to introduce evidence to that
effect to counter it in trials. To instead penalize the paper’s
publisher and author, they note, would violate the First
Amendment.

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