West Publishing was hit with a verdict of more than $5.1 million in a defamation suit brought by two law professors who claimed their reputations were damaged when West falsely identified them as the authors of a poorly researched treatise update.
After a four-day trial in Rudovsky v. West Publishing, the jury late on Thursday awarded the two professors — David Rudovsky of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Leonard Sosnov of Widener Law School — compensatory damages of $90,000 each and punitive damages of $2.5 million each, for a total award of $5,180,000.
