The court held that statements made in connection with judicial proceedings are absolutely privileged from defamation liability when pertinent to the proceeding, including communications with counsel, pleadings, investigative statements to authorities, and relevant trial testimony.
Supreme Court of New Hampshire, 1979
Published opinions from 1979. The case name opens the case page.
1979 opinions
The court abandoned New Hampshire's zone-of-danger bar for parental bystander claims and adopted a traditional negligence and foreseeability analysis. Parents may recover for serious emotional harm caused by contemporaneously witnessing or sensorially perceiving a serious injury to their child, provided the harm has…
The court denied habeas relief, rejecting a facial challenge to the statutory-rape provision. It held that, even assuming adults possess a protected privacy interest in consensual intercourse with other adults, that interest does not extend to intercourse with a person whom the legislature has deemed legally incapable…