Two business professors at Boise State University and an environmental activist have reached a settlement with the University of Denver, which they sued for defamation last year after the university retracted an article they had published in its law journal. Under the deal, Denver will apologize to the authors and pay them an undisclosed amount.
The dispute involved an article in the spring 1998 issue of the Denver Journal of International Law and Policy. The article, by William A. Wines, a professor of legal environment and business ethics at Boise State; Mark A. Buchanan, an associate professor of law there; and Donald J. Smith, the Idaho field representative of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, was titled “The Critical Need for Law Reform to Regulate the Abusive Practices of Transnational Corporations: The Illustrative Case of Boise Cascade Corporation in Mexico’s Costa Grande and Elsewhere” (The Chronicle, December 8, 2000).
The authors wrote that some multinational corporations, particularly Boise Cascade, had committed environmental abuses and had contributed to civil unrest in Mexico that had resulted in human-rights abuses. Boise Cascade has denied the allegations.
In October 1999, the University of Denver, after being contacted by Boise Cascade, “withdrew” the article -- without contacting the authors -- and directed the two major electronic legal-text providers -- Lexis and Westlaw -- to remove it from online access.
In its summer 1999 issue, the Denver law journal published an “errata” notice saying that it had taken those actions because the article “was not consistent with the editorial standards” of the journal and the university, and that portions of the article relating to Boise Cascade “were clearly inappropriate and require elimination, revision or correction.”
The authors, who learned of the journal’s actions only when they received letters from the corporation demanding that they “immediately cease distributing copies of the article and immediately stop making false and defamatory statements about Boise Cascade,” demanded that the university reinstate their article and withdraw the errata notice.
When the university refused, the authors sued in federal court for defamation, arguing that the institution had damaged their reputations and breached a contract to publish the article.
Under the settlement, the journal will publish an apology to the authors. The university will pay an undisclosed amount to the three men, who had asked in their suit for at least $75,000 each, and will return the article’s copyright to them. They have not indicated publicly whether they will seek to republish the work.
“It’s a matter of the three of us sitting down, putting the effort together, and then moving with it,” said Mr. Smith. “Do we want to edit it a bit here and there? Do we want to develop it more, maybe delete parts of it?” Under the terms of the settlement, should they republish the article, the authors cannot mention its having appeared in the Denver journal.
After news reports of the settlement surfaced in August, Denver announced the wording of the apology that the journal will publish.
It reads, in part: “Both the university and the authors continue to believe their actions were justified. They recognize, however, the benefit of resolving the litigation without additional expenditure of time and resources. The university regrets any harm to the lives or reputations of the authors that may have resulted from these unfortunate events. All parties acknowledge the importance of academic freedom, both for authors and institutions of higher learning.
“The university has the utmost respect for the authors’ academic achievements and wishes to reiterate its respect for the First Amendment and its legacy of a robust, wide-open, and healthy public discussion of important social issues.”
Boise Cascade has maintained throughout the dispute that it does not oppose the authors’ right to free speech, but that they have an obligation to be accurate and fair. University officials have made similar statements.
Among the statements in the article disputed by Boise Cascade were that the company had fomented civil unrest when it invested in a lumber mill in Guerrero, a state of Mexico that had been shaken by a massacre of 17 campesinos during protests over, among other issues, timber rights. Amnesty International is pressing authorities in the region to investigate the deaths and imprisonments of peasant “ecologistas” who had been protesting logging-related activities by companies including Boise Cascade.
The company continues to urge the authors not to republish the article. In a June letter to them, Jeffrey D. Neumeyer, a lawyer for Boise Cascade, reiterated its position that “various statements made about Boise Cascade in your article are absolutely false.” The article “should be extinguished once and for all,” he wrote, adding, “If we learn that you continue to republish or distribute the article without correcting the false information contained in the article, we will take appropriate action.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Page: A25
