Professor's #TheyLied Defamation Case Against National Academy of Sciences (Related to Sexual Harassment Allegations) Can Go Forward
A D.C. Circuit court has allowed a defamation case brought by Professor Luis Jaime Castillo Butters against the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to proceed. The case stems from the NAS's decision to rescind Butters's membership following allegations of sexual harassment made by a former student. The court found that Butters adequately alleged that the statements made by the NAS regarding his conduct could be interpreted as defamatory.
- ▪Professor Luis Jaime Castillo Butters's membership in the NAS was rescinded due to allegations of sexual harassment.
- ▪The court ruled that Butters's claims of defamation and false light invasion of privacy could move forward.
- ▪The NAS's statements regarding Butters's conduct were deemed capable of a defamatory meaning.
Reason Magazine files mainly under politics. We currently carry 504 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Reason.com |
| Canonical URL | https://reason.com/volokh/2026/05/22/professors-theylied-defamation-case-against-national-academy-of-sciences-related-to-sexual-harassment-allegations-can-go-forward/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 22 May 2026 22:56:05 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-22T23:02:03.354Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-22T23:37:40.399Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | XedFdK2af-R2 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Free Speech Professor's #TheyLied Defamation Case Against National Academy of Sciences (Related to Sexual Harassment Allegations) Can Go Forward Eugene Volokh | 5.22.2026 6:56 PM From today's D.C. Circuit decision in Butters v. Nat'l Acad. of Sciences, by Judge Douglas Ginsburg, joined by Judges Karen LeCraft Henderson and Florence Pan: This consolidated appeal involves claims of defamation, defamation by implication, and false light invasion of privacy relating to the rescission of Luis Jaime Castillo Butters's membership in the National Academy of Sciences. Castillo brought these claims against the NAS and its president, Marcia McNutt, after they made statements concerning Castillo's ouster…. Castillo is a professor of archaeology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Reason.com.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Reason.com
