A unanimous three-judge panel of the Ohio Court docket of Appeals handed down a long-awaited resolution Thursday within the case of Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin School. The courtroom dismissed all of Oberlin’s appellate claims and confirmed the jury’s discovering that the school, a small personal liberal arts establishment in rural Ohio, was responsible for libel, intentional infliction of emotional misery, and intentional interference with a enterprise relationship. It then upheld the trial jury’s award to Gibson’s Bakery of $11.1 million in compensatory damages, $33.2 million in punitive damages and $6.3 million in attorneys’ charges.
When the unique verdict was issued, Oberlin and far of the tutorial group, as evidenced by friend-of-the-court briefs filed within the case, typically hyperventilated, as if tutorial freedom had been at stake. Carmen Twillie Ambar, Oberlin’s president, advised a CBS reporter on the time that the jury had inappropriately held the school liable for the train by its college students of their First Modification proper to protest. She claimed that the right query ought to have been “whether or not a university ought to be held responsible for the speech of its college students.” When confronted by the reporter with Gibson’s lawyer’s level that the First Modification wasn’t at problem within the trial, she blithely replied that these claims had been “misstating what the jury discovered.” In its ruling, the Court docket of Appeals agreed with Gibson.
