The uninhibited Sullivan debate continues: Lee Levine responds to G. Edward White — First Amendment News 435

In time all things pass or change. The question is, how long and how much? New times bring new adversaries, or new ways of looking at life and law. Or sometimes it’s just a reconfiguration of reality that upsets the proverbial applecart.

Enter New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the landmark 1964 First Amendment opinion. Within a decade after Sullivan the Burger Court began to clip the reach of the holding in that seminal case. In more recent times then-presidential candidate Donald Trump spoke boldly about the constitutional order set in place by Sullivan: 

I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We’re going to open up those libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.

Largely sympathetic to that view, Justices Clarence Thomas (here also) and Neil Gorsuch along with Circuit Judge Laurence Silberman and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin have all leveled their own attacks on Sullivan. 

Against that backdrop comes G. Edward White, a distinguished professor of law at the University of Virginia. A former law clerk to then-retired Chief Justice Earl Warren (1971-72) and author of some 20 books, White’s expertise in legal history, constitutional law, First Amendment law, and torts have won him many awards. Hence, his recent SSRN posting of a research paper calling for certain limits on the reach of Sullivan merits attention. (See also Kenneth S. Abraham and G. Edward White, “Tort Law and the Construction of Change: Studies in the Inevitability of History” 2022, Chapter 4: The First Amendment and the Constitutionalization of Tort Liability).

To that end, we invited Lee Levine — a noted media lawyer who argued for the media defendants in Harte-Hanks Communications, Inc. v. Connaughton and Bartnicki v. Vopper — to respond to Professor White’s article. Mr. Levine is also the co-author, with Stephen Wermiel, of the 2014 book, “The Progeny: Justice William J. Brennan's Fight to Preserve the Legacy of New York Times v. Sullivan,” and the lead author of the treatise, “News Gathering and the Law” (5^th ed.). Mr. Levine’s reply is set out below. Professor White has been invited to reply.

— RKLC

By Lee Levine

In “Reconsidering the Legacy of New York Time v. Sullivan,” Professor G. Edward White joins the debate over the ongoing efficacy of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964) and its progeny. Unlike Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, however, Professor White stops short of advocating that Sullivan be overruled. Although he finds plenty to criticize in Justice William J. Brennan Jr.’s majority opinion in that case, he accepts its holding — that the First Amendment requires public officials to prove “actual malice” to prevail in a defamation action.

White’s Proposal: Overrule Butts and Gertz

Professor White argues that, after Sullivan, the Court lost its way by extending the actual malice standard to suits brought by “public figures.” Accordingly, he proposes that the cases responsible for that extension — Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts (1967) and Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. (1974) — be overruled and the cause of action as it existed at common law before those decisions be restored.

Professor White bases his proposal on what he describes as “four features affecting defamation cases not involving public officials.” He depicts two of them as “doctrinal” and the other two as “cultural.” 

On the doctrinal side of the equation, Professor White criticizes the Court in Sullivan for its alleged failure “to clearly articulate the source of the actual malice standard” as well as its “subsequent misguided application of the actual malice standard to defamation cases that did not raise the constitutional issues it identified” in Sullivan. 

On the “cultural” side, he points first to “changes in the landscape of media communications” over the last sixty years, most notably what he describes as “the more ideological character of mainstream media and an increased frequency of communications on the internet by anonymous sources.” 

To that, he adds “the advent of media insurance” which, he asserts, “makes it possible even for defendants who have violated the actual malice standard to secure themselves immunity from defamation judgments.” The “combination” of these four features, Professor White maintains, “has made it very difficult for persons injured by false and damaging statements about them to sue successfully in defamation.” 

The antidote, he concludes, is to “de-constitutionalize” defamation law in cases not involving public officials and return it “to its common law roots.”

There is much to unpack in Professor White’s analysis. In this essay, I will attempt both to identify those instances in which his proposal rests on shaky ground and those in which I concur that his criticism of Sullivan’s progeny is well founded. Based on that analysis, I will offer my own proposal for rectifying the Court’s missteps.

The ‘cultural features’

Neither of the “cultural features” on which Professor White bases his analysis hold up. The ability of defamation defendants to avoid liability for disseminating defamatory falsehoods by anonymous speakers on the internet is a function, not of Sullivan, but of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides them with absolute immunity. Professor White attempts to rebut this reality by describing the decision of a federal district court in Carafano v. Metroplash.com (Dist., CD., CA, 2002). In that case, the plaintiff, an actor, sued a “commercial internet dating service” for disseminating on its website a false and defamatory “profile” of her posted by an anonymous subscriber. The district court held that Section 230 did not immunize the defendant but that it was nevertheless protected from liability under Butts and Gertz because the plaintiff was a public figure who could not prove, by the necessary clear and convincing evidence, that the defendant knew the post was probably false as required by the actual malice standard.

Carafano does not support Professor White’s thesis for two reasons:

First, as he acknowledges, the Ninth Circuit declined to endorse the district court’s analysis, holding instead that Section 230 immunized the defendant from liability. 

Second, the district court’s reasoning is open to serious criticism on at least two other grounds: Its conclusions that the plaintiff, a successful but by no means famous actress, was a “general purpose” public figure and that, even if she were famous, she could not carry her burden of proving actual malice. 

The second ground bears particular emphasis. The defendant’s conceded lack of actual knowledge of the post’s falsity was undoubtedly a function of its belief, ultimately vindicated by the Ninth Circuit, that Section 230 absolved it of any duty to investigate the accuracy of third-party posts to its service. Absent Section 230, the defendant’s failure to take any steps to confirm the post’s accuracy would very likely have constituted sufficient evidence of “deliberate avoidance of the truth” to satisfy the actual malice standard under the Supreme Court’s decision in Harte-Hanks Communications v. Connaughton (1989). Far from demonstrating that Butts and Gertz are the cause of perverse results in the contemporary media landscape, Carafano illustrates how such outcomes are in fact a function of Section 230.

The role of media insurance

As for Professor White’s reliance on the “advent of media insurance,” his analysis is doubly flawed. Although Professor White describes the availability of media insurance covering defamation liability as a post-Sullivan phenomenon that has altered the calculus on which the Court based its decisions in Butts and Gertz, he elsewhere acknowledges (albeit without addressing the significance of the concession) that such insurance had “become readily available” by “at least the early 1960s.” 

Libel insurance was indeed an established feature of the media landscape well before Sullivan, not to mention Butts and Walker. The year before Sullivan was decided, the American Newspaper Publishers Association, the membership of which included the nation’s most significant media entities, established its own insurance facility to provide libel insurance to its members, offering them more favorable rates and coverage than other insurers already in the market.

Even if media insurance was not widely available and purchased prior to Sullivan, and it was, Professor White severely overstates its significance. Although he describes the requirement, contained in all such policies, that the insured take financial responsibility for a deductible or SIR (self-insured retention) before the policy’s coverage kicks in, he does not examine the significance of such exposure (which, as he notes, is often in excess of $1 million) on a media entity’s appetite for engaging in the kind of “uninhibited, robust and wide-open debate” envisioned by the Court in Sullivan. 

Professor White also has nothing to say about premiums — i.e., the cost of purchasing such insurance, which is very expensive and beyond the financial reach of many media entities. There is also the unexamined matter of underwriting, which not only increases both the premiums and deductibles offered to high-risk insureds — i.e., those media entities that are most likely to draw defamation claims by powerful and well-financed plaintiffs — it leaves many such entities unable to secure insurance at all.

Finally, Professor White does not examine the connection between the policy limits commercially available to most media insureds, on the one hand, and the enormous damage awards and settlements (more on this later), not to mention astronomical attorneys’ fees, that have come to characterize defamation litigation in the modern media “landscape.” Even factoring in the availability of “excess” insurance that the most well-heeled media companies can purchase, it is not unusual for damage awards and settlements to exceed the limits of all available coverage or, as in the case of Hulk Hogan’s suit against Gawker, to throw the defendant into bankruptcy.

One last point on insurance. Perhaps I am missing something, but I cannot figure out why, as Professor White states, “[m]assive defamation judgments against media enterprises are not likely to occur when insurance is present.” I am also at a loss to understand why, as he asserts, the fact that a defendant has insurance would make it “very difficult for persons injured by false and damaging statements about them to sue successfully in defamation.” Most plaintiffs’ lawyers I know are very happy indeed to learn that the defendant they have sued has insurance that will be available to pay for any judgment or settlement they might secure. 

Like Justice Gorsuch before him, Professor White is simply wrong when he asserts that the public figure doctrine, along with his four “features,” have “made it very difficult for persons injured by false and defamatory statements about them to sue successfully for defamation.” That would come as a surprise to several of the multiple public figures, from the aforementioned Hulk Hogan to Dominion Voting Systems to Beef Products Inc., who have secured hundreds of millions in judgments and settlements against media entities in the last decade alone. Like Justice Gorsuch, Professor White reaches this conclusion by extrapolating from a survey conducted by the Media Law Resource Center, which found the number of trials in defamation cases has decreased in recent decades. As MLRC itself established in 2022, however, the decrease in the number of trials in defamation cases mirrors the rate of decrease in trials of civil cases across the board and, as in other civil actions, has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the number and size of settlements.

Two significant errors

Professor White is wrong about two other things, and they are significant:

First, he declares (albeit without citation) that, in “most ‘public figure’ cases,” there is “little risk” that defamation law had or would be “employed to punish defendants.” These plaintiffs, he claims, are “simply complaining that something false had been said about them which threatened to damage their reputation.” With respect, when candidate Donald Trump promised to “open up the libel laws,” a small army of public figures, from energy company executives to the CEO of the former President’s own social media company, led the charge. They sought, in the same manner as L.B. Sullivan and retired General Edwin Walker (one of the two original “public figures” identified in Butts), to weaponize defamation law to punish their critics and dissuade further scrutiny of their conduct. To be sure, some public figures, like Dominion Voting Systems, institute defamation actions to secure a remedy for reputational harm. And, as the Dominion case demonstrates, when a defendant has inflicted such harm by disseminating calculated falsehoods, the law should and does provide a remedy. 

Second, Professor White’s confidence in the common law as it existed before Sullivan is badly misplaced. The defamation tort as it existed in Alabama before Sullivan was no unicorn — in virtually all American jurisdictions, defamation was a strict liability tort in which damages were presumed and in which the “privileges” to which Professor White refers either did not apply to mass communications (the “common interest” privilege) or were construed narrowly (the “fair comment” privilege). Trust me, if the Don Blankenships and Devin Nuneses of the world were not obliged to prove either that the defendant they targeted published with any degree of fault or that they had actually been damaged by its publication, the incentive to unleash defamation law to punish critics and stifle debate would be off the charts. 

The ‘doctrinal’ features

Professor White is correct that, in Sullivan — a case in which a public official sued a newspaper for purported criticism of his official conduct — the Court understandably referenced the importance of “citizen critics” of government and the officials who administer it. He is also correct that, given the obvious goal of the plaintiff in that case (as well as in other then-pending cases against The New York Times by other public officials) to punish the newspaper for its reporting about civil rights in Alabama and to dissuade it and other media entities from doing so, the Court wrote of both the dangers of “self-censorship” and the need for “breathing space” to ensure that unintentional errors not “chill” public debate. And, although Professor White does not mention it, his position is bolstered, at least to an extent, by the Court’s analogy to the Sedition Act of 1798 and the subsequent consensus that its penalties for criticism of public officials were unconstitutional.

Still, Professor White places more weight on these portions of Justice Brennan’s opinion than they can reasonably bear. The overarching basis for the Court’s decision in Sullivan is its recognition that, in a self-governing society, the government should rarely have the power to regulate, whether through statute or at common law, the ability of its citizens to publish or receive information about public matters. This doctrinal construct, championed by Professor Alexander Meiklejohn, is not only expressly referenced in Justice Brennan’s opinion but is the basis of a law review article he wrote shortly thereafter explaining its import. It is no wonder that, as Professor Harry Kalven famously recounted, upon reading Brennan’s analysis in Sullivan, Meiklejohn pronounced it “an occasion for dancing in the streets.” 

In the years immediately following Sullivan, the Court wasted little time in making this plain. In Garrison v. Louisiana, decided only a few months after Sullivan, Justice Brennan wrote for the Court that “speech concerning public affairs is more than self-expression; it is the essence of self-government.” Shortly thereafter, in his opinion for the Court in Time, Inc. v. Hill, Justice Brennan recalled and reemphasized the Court’s previous declaration in Thornhill v. Alabama that “freedom of discussion, if it would fulfill its historic function in this nation, must embrace all issues about which information is needed or appropriate to enable the members of society to cope with the exigencies of their period.” 

In short, by the time the Court decided Butts later that same year, it was well established that the speech about public officials at issue in Sullivan was a subset of a larger universe of information about public affairs — the free flow of which is essential to self-government. As Stephen Wermiel and I have documented in our book “The Progeny: Justice William J. Brennan's Fight to Preserve the Legacy of New York Times v. Sullivan,” the Court has, with one notable exception (to be discussed presently), been remarkably consistent in reconfirming these doctrinal roots of the actual malice standard, both in its defamation jurisprudence and in analogous cases such as Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, Snyder v. Phelps, and, most recently, Counterman v. Colorado.

The Trouble with Gertz: Agreeing and disagreeing in part

The exception to which I referred in the preceding paragraph is Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. I agree with Professor White that Justice Powell’s opinion for the Court in Gertz is difficult to square with either Sullivan or its previous progeny, but not for entirely the same reasons articulated by Professor White. He is correct that Justice Powell’s justification for abandoning the “matter of public concern” standard embraced by Justice Brennan and a plurality of the Court in Rosenbloom v. Metromedia in favor of the “public figure” doctrine cannot be traced to Sullivan. 

In Gertz, Justice Powell engaged in a conscious and explicit exercise of balancing what he deemed to be competing interests — the First Amendment interest in free expression and the societal interest in providing a remedy for injury to reputation. He did so by crafting what can best be described as a piece of judicial legislation, an elaborate set of rules to govern defamation cases nationwide. Not only did Gertz codify a distinction between public and private figures, it defined two categories of the former ostensibly based on their access to self-help and assumption of risk. 

Justice Powell did not stop there. His codification also required that all plaintiffs establish, at a minimum, the defendant’s negligence — at least when the subject matter of the defamation involved a topic of public concern; that all plaintiffs establish actual malice if they wish to recover presumed or punitive damages; and that, absent such proof, all plaintiffs would henceforth be limited to recovery for “actual injury.” I agree with Professor White that all of this turned the common law on its head and none of it can plausibly be traced to Sullivan.

Where I part company with Professor White is in my understanding of the constitutional exercise in which the Court engaged in Sullivan. Simply put, Gertz was judicial legislation; Sullivan was constitutional interpretation. As the Court had recognized as early as Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire and as Justice Brennan himself emphasized before Sullivan in Roth v. United States, the “freedom of speech” protected by the First Amendment is not self-defining. Courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court, must interpret that phrase and give it meaning. 

Beginning with Chaplinsky, the Court undertook to identify and define those categories of words that do not constitute “speech” for the purposes of the First Amendment, and could therefore be regulated by the government. Through an exercise in “definitional balancing,” the Court undertook to draw constitutional lines between speech that fell outside the First Amendment — because it constituted fighting words, obscenity, incitement, or libel — and speech that, no matter how a legislature or court might label it, retained its constitutional protection.

In Sullivan and its early progeny up through and including Rosenbloom, the Court held that, in the realm of speech about matters of public concern, the “freedom of speech” protected by the First Amendment does not include the calculated falsehood, i.e., speech disseminated with “actual malice” in the sense that the speaker knew it was false or probably false. This is not a higher level of the kind of negligence standard Justice Powell imposed in Gertz; it is a recognition that, for purposes of the First Amendment, the knowing lie that injures reputation contributes nothing to public debate and is therefore undeserving of its protections. Its genesis certainly had nothing to do with common law scienter requirements of the kind Professor White posits, and then criticizes the Court in Sullivan for deviating from.

‘Or of the Press’: The media then and now

This leads me, finally, to one aspect of Professor White’s analysis that bears emphasis but from which, once again, I draw a very different conclusion. In his discussion of the contemporary media “landscape,” Professor White makes much of the difference between the media as it existed in 1964, which he describes as “centrist enterprises committed to ‘objective’ reporting,” and the internet wild west in which we live today, where anonymous speakers and ideologically driven media run roughshod over individual reputation.

Likely because Sullivan itself involved both a news media defendant (The New York Times) and individual defendants (the four ministers who signed their names to the advertisement at issue), the Court focused its constitutional analysis on the First Amendment’s Speech Clause. In some subsequent cases, and especially in Gertz, the Court nevertheless appeared to direct its analysis at the mainstream news media (even though the John Birch Society publication at issue in that case bore a much closer resemblance to Alex Jones or The Gateway Pundit than it did to The New York Times). 

Ultimately, a majority of the Court rejected a media/non-media distinction for First Amendment purpose in Greenmoss Builders v. Dun & Bradstreet, ironically in favor of resurrecting the “matter of public concern” requirement Justice Powell had ostensibly repudiated in Gertz.

As a result, except for some provocative language in Philadelphia Newspapers v. Hepps, the Court has declined to look to the First Amendment’s Press Clause as a source of protection from defamation liability for the responsible media Professor White describes (albeit largely as a relic of the past). I believe this is and has always been a mistake. 

For more than a year, I have had the privilege of exploring, under the leadership of Floyd Abrams and Sandra Baron, and the generous financial support of the Stanton Foundation, the ways in which the Press Clause might be enlisted to realize the purposes of the constitutional amendment of which it is a part. A comprehensive report detailing the project’s findings to date will be published shortly. 

For present purposes, I submit that the Press Clause can and should be the source of a definitional balance that grants more protection to the institutional press than to other speakers in some defamation cases. Undertaking that exercise in constitutional interpretation would go a long way toward remedying what troubles Professor White about the current regime. It would, at least as I see it, be far more effective in doing so than artificially limiting such protection, as Professor White advocates, to speech about public officials.

Video panel discussion on ‘actual malice’ standard 

• “Actual Malice: Ongoing Threats to New York Times v. Sullivan and Its Progeny,” The Bech-Loughlin First Amendment Center (University of Texas, Austin) (David McCraw, Justin Nelson, Lyrissa Lidsky, and Amy Kristin Sanders)

View video

Related

• Ronald K.L. Collins, “Review essay: Handman and Feder on Barbas’ ‘Actual Malice’ — A new look at NYT v. Sullivan — First Amendment News 375,” FIRE (April 12, 2023)
• Lee Rawles, Samantha Barbas, “Why NYT v. Sullivan mattered in 1964 and is under attack today,” Modern Law Library Podcast, ABA J. (March 29, 2023)
• Angel Eduardo, “Why New York Times v. Sullivan matters more than ever,” FIRE (March 7, 2023)
• Ronald K.L. Collins, “Bruce Johnson responds to Judge Laurence Silberman’s attack on NYT v. Sullivan,” First Amendment News (March 24, 2021)
• Ronald K.L. Collins, "Contra-Justice Thomas, the originalist debate continues — a review of Wendell Bird’s ‘Criminal Dissent’," First Amendment News 277 (Nov. 11, 2020)
• Ronald K.L. Collins, “Justice Thomas urges Court to pare back Section 230’s ‘sweeping immunity’," First Amendment News 275 (Oct. 21, 2020)
• Ronald K.L. Collins, “More on originalism and the First Amendment, enter Matthew Schafer,” First Amendment News 274 (Oct. 7, 2020)
• Ronald K.L. Collins, “Ian Millhiser on Justice Thomas’s maverick views on modern free speech jurisprudence,” First Amendment News 254 (May 13, 2020)
• Lee Levine and Stephen Wermiel: “Dubious Doubts and 'the Central Meaning of the First Amendment'—A Preliminary Reply to Justice Thomas,” First Amendment News 202.1 (March 1, 2019)
• Steve Vladeck, “Trump's attacks on the First Amendment and the press gain an ally in Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas,” NBC News (Feb. 20, 2019)

2023-2024 SCOTUS term: Free expression and related cases

Cases decided

• O’Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier
• Speech First, Inc. v. Sands (certiorari granted, judgment re the bias policy claims vacated, and case remanded to the Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit with instructions to dismiss those claims as moot) (Thomas and Alito, dissenting)
• National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo 
• Vidal v. Elster
• Gonzalez v. Trevino (vacated and remanded, per curiam with Alito, Kavanaugh, and Jackson (joined by Sotomayor) concurring in separate opinions and Thomas dissenting)
• Murthy v Missouri (decided on Art. III standing grounds)
• Moody v. NetChoice, LLC and NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton 

Review granted

• Free Speech Coalition, Inc., et al., v. Paxton
• Vidal v. Elster (argued Nov. 1)
• O’Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier (decided March 15, see below under “State Action”)
• Moody v. NetChoice, LLC and NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton (argued: Feb. 26)
• National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo (argued March 18)
• Murthy v Missouri (argued March 18)
• Gonzalez v. Trevino (argued March 20)

Pending petitions

• Henderson v. Texas
• Murphy v. Schmitt
• Villarreal v. Alaniz 
• No on E, San Franciscans Opposing the Affordable Care Housing Production Act, et al. v. Chiu

State action

• Lindke v. Freed (Barrett, J., 9-0: “The state-action doctrine requires Lindke to show that Freed (1) had actual authority to speak on behalf of the State on a particular matter, and (2) purported to exercise that authority in the relevant posts. To the extent that this test differs from the one applied by the Sixth Circuit, we vacate its judgment and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”)
• O’Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier (Per Curiam: 9-0: “We granted certiorari in this case and in Lindke v. Freed (2024), to resolve a Circuit split about how to identify state action in the context of public officials using social media. Because the approach that the Ninth Circuit applied is different from the one we have elaborated in Lindke, we vacate the judgment below and remand the case to the Ninth Circuit for further proceedings consistent with our opinion in that case.”)

Review denied

• In Re First Choice Women's Resource Centers, Inc.
• Pierre v. Attorney Grievance Commission of Maryland
• O’Handley v. Weber
• Frank v. Lee
• Mckesson v. Doe (Separate statement by Sotomayor, J.)
• Brokamp v. James
• Griffin v. HM Florida-ORL (application for stay denied)
• M. C. v. Indiana Department of Child Services
• Spectrum et al v. Wendler
• Porter v. Martinez
• Molina v. Book
• Porter v. Board of Trustees of North Carolina State University
• NetChoice, LLC v. Moody
• Alaska v. Alaska State Employees Association
• X Corp. v. Garland
• Tingley v. Ferguson (Justice Kavanaugh would grant the petition for a writ of certiorari. Justice Thomas, dissenting from the denial of certiorari. (separate opinion) Justice Alito, dissenting from the denial of certiorari. (separate opinion))
• Jarrett v. Service Employees International Union Local 503, et al
• Sharpe v. Winterville Police Dept.
• Winterville Police Department v. Sharpe
• Stein v. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Inc., et al.
• Blankenship v. NBCUniversal, LLC
• Center for Medical Progress v. National Abortion Federation
• Frese v. Formella
• Mazo v. Way

Free speech related 

• Miller v. United States (judgment vacated, and case remanded) (statutory interpretation of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c) advocacy, lobbying and protest in connection with congressional proceedings) 
• Fischer v. United States (vacated and remanded, 6-3 per Roberts with Barrett, Sotomayor and Kagan dissenting: “To prove a violation of §1512(c)(2), the Government must establish that the defendant impaired the availability or integrity for use in an official proceeding of records, documents, objects, or other things used in an official proceeding, or attempted to do so.”)

Last scheduled FAN

FAN 434: “Can a federal agency gag those who enter into settlement agreements? The SEC says yes, NCLA challenges silencing practice”

This article is part of First Amendment News, an editorially independent publication edited by Ronald K. L. Collins and hosted by FIRE as part of our mission to educate the public about First Amendment issues. The opinions expressed are those of the article’s author(s) and may not reflect the opinions of FIRE or Mr. Collins.