Antonin Scalia

“ In sum, while the Court's opinion is correct insofar as the critical point of deference to jury findings is concerned, I see no basis for consulting only a limited number of the permissible findings. I would have adopted the Sixth Circuit's analysis in its entirety, making our independent assessment of whether malice was clearly and convincingly proved on the assumption that the jury made all the supportive findings it reasonably could have made. That is what common-law courts have always done, and there is ultimately no alternative to it. ”

“ It may well be true that "we need only consider those factual findings that were essential to the jury verdict" in the sense that referring to those alone is enough to decide the case-i.e., those alone establish clear and convincing proof of malice. But one could pick out any number of categories of permissible jury findings that would meet that test. For example, it might be true that we could find the requisite proof of malice by considering, not all the evidence in its light most favorable to the plaintiff, but only that evidence produced by a particular witness. ”

“ We would, as the Sixth Circuit did, assume that all those disputes were resolved in the plaintiff's favor-unless, of course, we again devised some nonfunctional category of the remaining disputes that we could look to, perhaps those pertaining to testimony by Mr. Smith. ”