| I'd like to present a related hypothetical situation.
Let's say we lived in a society with no State. In this example, the school in question would be a private organization. The Sheriff's Office would be replaced by multiple insurance providers. Of course, the newspaper would still be privately owned.
So instead of the newspaper suing the Sheriff's Office, it would have to... what? Ask the insurance providers for the names of their clients with concealed-carry permits*. There could be no hope for a lawsuit, since there would be no law in the traditional sense. Could the newspaper appeal to any other agency? Not directly, I think. From what I see, withholding the names of internally-licensed concealed-carriers does not entail fraud, theft, destruction of property, assault, rape, murder, or anything else that I consider malum se.** The only chance the newspaper would have is if it had a full-disclosure contract with every insurance provider in question. I think such a proposition would be unlikely, to say the least.
Where does that leave us? Essentially, in an anarchist society, the newspaper would be unable to (nonviolently) extract the names of concealed-carriers from their respective insurance providers. All it could do is resort to moral proclamations against concealed-carry.
Even in a statist society (i.e. a society with any form of State), the grounds for such a lawsuit would likely be nonsense. What harm is the Sheriff's Office doing against the newspaper? It seems unlikely that the newspaper, as a private organization, could legally represent "the public" more than the Sheriff's Office can. Therefore, I'm at a loss to explain the legal grounds for the newspaper's lawsuit in reality.
- Rob
* I am assuming that such permits would exist with the insurance providers for full-disclosure purposes.
** Latin for "bad in itself". In legal theory, this is opposed to malum prohibitum, "bad by fiat". |