Public figure

The Rhode Island Supreme Court upheld the dismissal of a defamation claim brought by a restaurant owner against two journalists for their coverage of a 2009 "off the record" event at his restaurant where attendees included politicians, businesspeople and press members.

A Florida judge has dismissed a former U.S. Senate candidate's libel suit against the St. Petersburg Times and The Miami Herald.

An Iowa jury awarded a state senator $231,000 in a defamation suit last week, finding that his opponent and the local Democratic Party defamed him in a TV ad that ran during the 2010 senate race.

State Sen. Rick Bertrand, a Republican, filed the suit with the Woodbury County District Court within 48 hours after the campaign ad aired claiming that Bertrand “put profit over children’s health,” according to the senator. The ad was paid for by the Iowa Democratic Party and approved by his opponent Rick Mullin, who would eventually lose the election to Bertrand.

A U.S. District Court ruled that the FBI must release unredacted documents about Ronald Reagan to a journalist who has legally sought the information for the last 27 years in an attempt to prove that the former president was not only a bureau informant, but that the FBI assisted in his political career in return.

Earlier this week the Georgia Supreme Court declined to review a lower court decision in the long-running libel case against The Atlanta Journal-Constitution filed by Richard Jewell, who was wrongfully accused of the 1996 Olympic Park bombing, and carried on by his family since his death in 2007.

Two sugar-cane plantation owners from the Dominican Republic must satisfy a higher standard reserved for public figures if they are to prevail in a libel suit against American filmmakers who made a documentary critical of the Caribbean nation's sugar industry, a federal court of appeals has ruled.

Reporters at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution did not libel a security guard, who was at first hailed as a hero after the 1996 bombing at Centennial Olympic Park, when they reported authorities were investigating him as a suspect in the bombing, the Georgia Court of Appeals ruled this month.

A California appellate court last week affirmed a lower court ruling that a bank manager presented enough evidence to allow his defamation claim against McGraw-Hill to proceed, thus rejecting the publisher's anti-SLAPP argument. The manager alleged that he was defamed by statements about the mortgage crisis in a BusinessWeek article.

The Supreme Court on Monday said a lawsuit filed against Hustler magazine by the family of a deceased professional wrestler can proceed and that it will not hear the magazine's appeal.

CBS could have acted with actual malice when it broadcast a story about a government employee who was investigated for allegations she had used federal dollars to buy a Ford Mustang, a federal court in New Mexico has ruled.