The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has slapped the New York Times by reviving a defamation lawsuit filed against it by a Louisiana economics professor and libertarian who sued the newspaper for defamation after he was quoted in an article stating that slavery was "not so bad."
The decision reverses a lower court ruling dismissing the case filed against the NYT after the paper defended itself using Louisiana's anti-SLAPP statute, which allows courts to dismiss defamation suits against defendants who speak out on free speech issues.
In Block v. New York Times , Walter Block, an economics professor at Loyola University and an adjunct scholar at the Mises Institute, sued the newspaper alleging it mispresented his statements in an article that attributed racist views to libertarian scholars and discussed how ties with libertarian thinkers would impact libertarian U.S. Sen. Rand Paul's potential presidential candidacy.
The NYT article quoted Block twice. The first quote attributed to him as "one economist" in the context of the statement that some Mises Institute scholars "have championed the Confederacy" including "one economist, while faulting slavery because it was involuntary, suggested in an interview that the daily life of the enslaved was 'not so bad you pick cotton and sing songs.' "
The second quoted Block by name as a Loyola University economics professor who described slavery as "not so bad" and who was also highly critical of the Civil Rights Act. "Woolworth's had lunchroom counters, and no blacks were allowed," Block was quoted. "Did they have a right to do that? Yes, they did. No one is compelled to associate with people against their will.''
Block alleges that the NYT article misrepresented his position, and consistent with his published writings and self-described libertarian views, that he articulated the following position during his interview:
"Free association is a very important aspect of liberty. It is crucial. Indeed, its lack was the major problem with slavery. The slaves could not quit. They were forced to 'associate' with their masters when they would have vastly preferred not to do so. Otherwise, slavery wasn't so bad. You could pick cotton, sing songs, be fed nice gruel, etc. The only real problem was that this relationship was compulsory. It violated the free law of association, and that of the slave's private property rights in their own persons. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, to a much smaller degree of course, made partial slaves of the owners of establishments like Woolworths."