Court Backs 1992 Law on Free Speech

In a broad interpretation of a law designed to protect free speech, the California Supreme Court decided Thursday that statements related to disputes before public agencies are protected against lawsuits.

“It is a home run for the 1st Amendment and for free speech,” said Karl Olson, who represented the California Newspaper Assn. and others, including Times Mirror Co., the publisher of The Times, before the state high court.

The 5-2 ruling is likely to expand the use of a 1992 state law that was designed to stop private lawsuits intended to intimidate people from exercising their rights to free speech. The law was aimed at shielding participants in official proceedings from being sued for statements made relating to those proceedings. The law also shields news organizations that publish such statements.

The case before the court involved a landlord who sued a Bay Area nonprofit housing group. The suit alleged that while helping a tenant file a discrimination complaint with a federal housing agency, staff members of the housing group referred to the landlord as a drunk, a racist and a redneck.

A Court of Appeal upheld the landlord’s right to sue, declaring the alleged statements did not address an issue of public significance. But the Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar, said the 1992 law protects such speech as long as it relates to a public proceeding.

If the speech stems from an official proceeding, such as a court hearing or a City Council meeting, a defendant “need not separately demonstrate that the statement concerned an issue of public significance,” Werdegar wrote for the court.

The 1992 law allows defendants in such cases to have the suits promptly dismissed and to recover attorneys’ fees, which are not normally available in private litigation.

Justices Marvin R. Baxter and Janice Rogers Brown agreed that the tenant group should be spared the lawsuit but complained that the court’s ruling went too far. They said the decision will apply the law to litigation it was never intended to eliminate.

“The Legislature could not possibly have intended that any litigation arising from any written or oral statement made during or in connection with any legislative, executive, judicial or other official proceeding should automatically qualify” as free speech protected by the 1992 law, Baxter wrote.

He said a “potentially huge number of cases” may now be automatically dismissed.

The lawsuit that triggered the ruling was brought by Dan and Judy Briggs, who own a 30-unit apartment building in the Bay Area.

The couple said that the housing group, while helping the tenant file the discrimination complaint, defamed Dan Briggs. Minutes of the group’s board meetings also revealed that the directors discussed whether Briggs was mentally unbalanced, the court said.

Kevin Anderson, a lawyer for the couple, said their rental units pay for their retirement. “These people may now very well lose the apartment building for attorneys’ fees,” he said. “It is really a horrible result.”

He also predicted the decision will spark an alarming rise in motions to dismiss legitimate lawsuits.

“Anybody can comment about anything, and now it is irrelevant that it has no public interest as long as it was uttered in relation to some proceeding,” Anderson said.

Elizabeth Bader, a lawyer for the housing group, said the landlord’s allegations were false.

The court’s ruling has “vindicated the 1st Amendment rights of California citizens by construing the . . . statute to cover 1st Amendment activity across the board and on a wide-ranging number of cases,” she said.

The ruling will not stop meritorious lawsuits, she contended. She cited the example of a neighbor who is involved in an official proceeding with another neighbor over a dispute about the line between their lots. The neighbors could be sued for defamation if they spread lies about each other outside the context of the dispute, Bader said.