State Medical Ass'n of Tex. v. Committee for Chiropractic Ed.
| Decision Date | 25 January 1951 |
| Docket Number | No. 12246,12246 |
| Parties | STATE MEDICAL ASS'N OF TEXAS v. COMMITTEE FOR CHIROPRACTIC EDUCATION, Inc. |
| Court | Texas Court of Appeals |
Samuels, Brown, Herman & Scott and Sidney L. Samuels, all of Fort Worth, Philip R. Overton, of Austin, and Rex Clawson, of Houston, for appellant.
C. M. Faber and J. Edwin Smith, of Houston, Allen, Smith, Neal & Lehmann, of Houston, of counsel, for appellee.
Appellee, Committee for Chiropractic Education, Inc., brought this action in the District Court of Harris County, for the recovery of damages from appellant, State Medical Association of Texas, for an alleged libel published in the Houston Chronicle on March 6, 1949.
Appellant timely filed its statutory plea of privilege to be sued in Travis County, Texas, the county of its residence, and this plea was timely controverted by appellee who claimed venue under Exception 29 of Article 1995, which provides that a suit for damage for libel or slander shall be brought, and can only be maintained, in the county in which the plaintiff resided at the time of the accrual of the cause of action, or in the county where the defendant resided at the time of fling suit, or in the county of the residence of defendant, or any of them, or the domicile of any corporate defendant, at the election of the plaintiff.
On a hearing before the court of the plea of privilege and controverting affirdavit an order was entered overruling appellant's plea of privilege.
Appellee is a non-profit organization incorporated under the laws of the State of Texas for the purpose of maintaining a non-profit educational foundation. Appellee alleged that on February 28, 1949, it caused to be published and circulated in Harris and other counties in the state of Texas, eight pages of advertisements concerning the chiropractic profession, and that appellant, joined by the Harris County Medical Society and the Travis County Medical Society of Travis County, caused a statement to be published in the Houston Chronicle in Houston, Texas, and other papers in the state, in which it was stated that the publication by appellee in the Houston Post of February 28, 1949, The Harris County Medical Society and the Travis County Medical Society were made parties to the suit and the Travis County Medical Society was later dismissed.
Appellee alleged that it and the chiropractic profession in general had suffered great injury and damage from the publication and circulation of said statement in Harris, and in other counties in the state of Texas, for which is sought recovery of actual and exemplary damages.
Appellant relies in the appeal on six points of assigned error in which it contends that appellee failed to make out a prima facie case of libel against it since the language charged as a defamatory was in no sense libelous per se; that appellee's petition contained no specific charge of defamation, but that it merely stated that the advertimsement was packed with misrepresentations. Appellant contended that since appellee's charge could not be described as a libel per se and had failed to prove itself, it was essential to show that appellee had suffered damage by reason of the publication, and since appellee had failed to discharge this burden a prima facie case had not been made out and appellant's plea of privilege should have been sustained.
While we have been cited to no Texas cases passing upon the right of a non-profit corporation, as distinguished from a business corporation, to sue for libel, and have found none, the courts in other jurisdictions where we have found the point to have been raised have uniformly held that corporations engaged in charitable, social welfare, benevolent and religious work, have the right to acquire and hold property which may produce a profit or income and that, like other corporations, they have the same protection and rights in courts in case of injury as corporations engaged in business for profit. New York Society for the Suppression of Vice v. MacFadden Publications, 260 N.Y. 167, 183 N.E. 284, 86 A.L.R. 440. This rule is followed in the case of Finnish Temperance Society Sovittaja v. Finnish Socialistic Publishing Co., 238 Mass. 345, 130 N.E. 845.
Under an appropriate counter-point, appellee claims that it plead and has proved a defamation under the Texas statute defining libel when it established that appellant had had published an advertisement in which it stated that: ...
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