The Second Circuit recently held that scientific opinions voiced during debate of unsettled questions generally cannot support false advertising or deceptive business practices claims. See ONY Inc. v. Cornerstone Therapeutics Inc., No.12-2414 (2d Cir. June 26, 2013).

Defendants in this case were various corporate sponsors, authors, and publishers of a scientific journal article comparing the effectiveness of several types of medical surfactants — biological substances that line the surface of human lungs. Surfactants are critical to lung function: they facilitate the transfer of oxygen from inhaled air into the blood stream.  Plaintiff ONY and defendant Chiesi Farmaceutici are two of the biggest producers of surfactants for medical treatment.  These parties vigorously contested the relative effectiveness of their products – in the marketplace, in the scientific literature, and in this lawsuit. The parties agreed that two variables are particularly relevant to this comparison: mortality rate and length of stay. Mortality rate means the percentage of patients (typically infants) treated with a particular surfactant who do not survive. Length of stay refers to the amount of time a patient infant remains in the hospital for treatment.

The dispute stemmed from a study funded by Chiesi, carried out by a private research firm, and then promoted and ultimately published by three doctors, which concluded that Chiesi’s surfactant product allegedly led to lower infant mortality rates than ONY’s product. The doctors submitted their article to the Journal of Perinatology, a leading journal in the field of neonatology. .After the article’s publication, Chiesi issued a press release touting its conclusions and distributed promotional materials that cited the article’s findings.  Plaintiff complained that the article – and the distribution of selections from it – violated the Lanham Act and New York General Business Law § 349, and also constituted tortious injurious falsehood and interference with prospective economic advantage.

The district court concluded that plaintiff failed to state a claim based on publication of the article because the challenged statements were protected scientific opinion. The Second Circuit agreed, concluding that, as a matter of law, statements of scientific conclusions about unsettled matters of scientific debate cannot give rise to liability for damages sounding in defamation.

Plaintiff claimed that the article made statements about scientific findings that were intentionally deceptive and misleading, and that it therefore constituted false advertising. Plaintiff’s theory was that scientific claims made in print purport to be statements of fact that are falsifiable, and such statements can be defamatory or represent false advertising if known to be false when made. Plaintiff argued on appeal that the district court based its conclusion that the article’s statements were non-actionable solely on its determination that the assertions were statements of opinion, without conducting a more vigorous inquiry.

The court of appeals noted that scientific academic discourse poses several problems for the fact-opinion paradigm of traditional First Amendment jurisprudence. Many conclusions contained in a scientific journal article are, in principle, “capable of verification or refutation by means of objective proof,” Phantom Touring, Inc. v. Affiliated Publ’ns, 953 F.2d 724, 728 n.7 (1st Cir. 1992). Indeed, it is the very premise of the scientific enterprise that it engages with empirically verifiable facts about the universe. At the same time, however, it is the essence of the scientific method that the conclusions of empirical research are tentative and subject to revision, because they represent inferences about the nature of reality based on the results of experimentation and observation. Importantly, those conclusions are presented in publications directed to the relevant scientific community, ideally in peer reviewed academic journals that warrant that research approved for publication demonstrates at least some degree of basic scientific competence. These conclusions are then available to other scientists who may respond by attempting to replicate the described experiments, conducting their own experiments, or analyzing or refuting the soundness of the experimental design or the validity of the inferences drawn from the results.

In a sufficiently novel area of research, propositions of empirical “fact” advanced in the literature may be highly controversial and subject to rigorous debate by qualified experts. Needless to say, courts are ill-equipped to undertake to referee such controversies. Instead, the trial of ideas plays out in the pages of peer-reviewed journals, and the scientific public sits as the jury.

Where, as here, a statement is made as part of an ongoing scientific discourse about which there is considerable disagreement, the traditional dividing line between fact and opinion is not entirely helpful. While statements about contested and contestable scientific hypotheses constitute assertions about the world that are in principle matters of verifiable “fact,” for purposes of the First Amendment and the
laws relating to fair competition and defamation, they are more closely akin to matters of opinion, and are so understood by the relevant scientific communities.

In that regard, said the court, it was relevant that plaintiff did not allege that the data presented in the article were fabricated or fraudulently created. If the data were falsified, the fraud might not be easily detectable by even the most informed members of the relevant scientific community. Rather, plaintiff here alleged that the inferences drawn from those data were the wrong ones, and that competent scientists would have included other data that were available to the defendant authors but that were not sufficiently taken into account in their analysis.

But when the conclusions reached by experiments are presented alongside an accurate description of the data taken into account and the methods used, the validity of the authors’ conclusions may be
assessed on their face by other members of the relevant discipline or specialty.The appeals panel therefore concluded that, to the extent a speaker or author draws conclusions from non-fraudulent data, based on accurate descriptions of the data and methodology underlying those conclusions, on subjects about which there is legitimate ongoing scientific disagreement, those statements are not grounds for a claim of false advertising. Even if the conclusions that the authors drew from the results of their data could be actionable, such claims would be suspect when, as here, the authors readily disclosed the potential shortcomings of their methodology and their potential conflicts of interest

This analysis properly reflected a worry about the chilling impact on crucial and valuable research, including comparative effectiveness research, of lawsuits by competitors who are unhappy with or disagree with the results of such studies. Such a debate belongs in the marketplace of scientific ideas, not in the court room.