https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/16/media/fox-news-court-dominion/index.html
Dominion has motioned for summary judgment, with a 192-page brief.
Nitpick: moved, not “motioned.”
the judge will be ruling on the summary judgment very soon.
Maybe, but why do you say this? I’ve had summary judgment motions pending for over a year after the briefing is complete. And other cases where decisions come very fast.
Dominion, Fox News attorneys to each seek summary judgment ahead of trial - ABC News (go.com)
less than a month to the trial date, both sides are asking for a summary judgement today. the trial day is set for april 17th. judge davis has indicated that preps are underway for the jury. 1800 jury notices were sent out.
they are at the now or never point. interesting paragraph in the link:
“A Fox attorney told ABC News that their plan Tuesday was to make the broad first amendment argument that there is no defamation – but that they would also go through many of the individual programs on Fox News, one by one, in hopes of showing that they were not making false statements of fact.”
Talk about failing the basic credibility test …
I can’t see the Court making a summary judgment on an important high profile case like this. Maybe I’m wrong, though.
The Alex Jones lawsuit was pretty high profile as well. Then again, he just didn’t bother to show up after months of requests, so that was a bit different.
I seriously doubt you are wrong. There is no reason I have seen for a summary judgement on either side, particularly for Fox after all the stupid text messages and Murdoch’s deposition. 100% this goes to trial unless Fox decides to settle.
Summary judgement is for clear cases where one side or the other has no hope as a matter of either law or agreed stipulated fact. I have not followed the case closely, but I’ll bet the amount of stipulated fact in this case is substantially zero. Which leaves matters of law. One thing one can say about the law of press & libel is that little is a fully settled matter except that the truth is an absolute defense. Given that Fox has never done anything truthful except inadvertently, and that any claims of truthfulness or not are justiciable questions, and probably not even then, that leaves little room for a non-crooked judge to grant summary judgment.
The other thing summary judgment is for (nowadays) is as a PR move with the public. It amounts to “Hey public, we’re telling the judge we think our opponent is an ignorant poopy-head! So you should believe us and loudly agree that they’re a poopy-head because after all, would we lie to a judge?”
I’d add that summary judgement motions force the other side to reveal somewhat how they plan to argue the case.
day 2 of summary judgement hearing. so far the judge has called one of fox’s arguments “intelligently dishonest”.
Imagine my shock.
Did the judge maybe mean “intellectually dishonest”?
I suspect the judge meant “deliberately and cleverly dishonest with malice aforethought”, but didn’t want to say something quite that clear-cut. Yet.
Besides, why wouldn’t you ask for summary judgement? I imagine that there’s a very low cost to filing the request, and on the off chance it’s granted, it’ll save you a ton of other costs.
Ars on the Judge’s ruling:
(Summary judgement that Fox lied)
Brian
The judge is unhappy with fox. They held back information in discovery. Jurors are being seated today. A jury group of 24 to be chosen today and tomorrow with trial to start Monday. Expected to take 6 weeks.
Rupert Murdock is expected to be called first after opening statements. Fox News under investigation for lying in court ahead of defamation trial : NPR
Fox News lawyers filed a letter with the court in an attempt to appease the judge. But the letter is a farce. It basically says “we’re sorry we omitted key information. We never meant to do it. We’re sorry we misled the court. We didn’t mean it.”
Now that they’ve been exposed as shameless liars, this seems to be a long-shot attempt at appeasing the judge that they’ve pissed off by shameless groveling without actually saying anything. I don’t think it’s gonna work.