The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that businesses can be held liable under Daniel’s Law for continuing to publish a protected person’s home address or telephone number without any showing that they acted intentionally, recklessly, or negligently.
In a unanimous decision, the court found that the law’s actual-damages provision contains no state-of-mind requirement. Once a private entity receives a valid removal request, it has ten business days to stop disclosing the protected information and can face damages of at least $1,000 for each violation if it fails to do so.
“Daniel’s Law contains no mental state requirement for the award of actual damages,” Justice Fabiana Pierre-Louis wrote for the court.
The decision came in a case brought by Atlas Data Privacy Corporation, which operates an online service that allows people covered by Daniel’s Law to send removal notices to entities possessing their personal information. Several police and corrections officers joined the lawsuit.
Atlas and the individual plaintiffs alleged that dozens of data brokers, real estate businesses, marketing companies and other entities continued to disclose protected addresses or telephone numbers after receiving removal notices.
The case reached the state’s highest court after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit asked it to determine what mental state, if any, is required to establish liability under the statute.
Daniel’s Law was enacted in 2020 after an assailant who obtained U.S. District Court Judge Esther Salas’ home address went to her North Brunswick residence and fatally shot her 20-year-old son, Daniel Anderl. Her husband, Mark Anderl, was seriously wounded.
The defendants argued that imposing liability without proof of fault could chill constitutionally protected speech. A federal district court declined to dismiss the litigation, interpreting Daniel’s Law as requiring negligence to avoid potential constitutional problems.
But Pierre-Louis said the Legislature expressly required “willful or reckless disregard of the law” before punitive damages may be awarded while omitting any comparable requirement from the section governing actual damages.
“When the Legislature includes limiting language in one part of a statute, but leaves it out of another section in which the limit could have been included, the Court infers that the omission was intentional,” Pierre-Louis wrote.
The court also pointed to the law’s legislative history. Its original 2020 version included “reasonable person” language resembling a negligence standard, but lawmakers removed that language in 2022 while adding the ten-business-day compliance period.
The justices rejected arguments from the state attorney general’s office and the plaintiffs that Daniel’s Law should be interpreted using standards derived from the common-law privacy tort involving the public disclosure of private facts. The court said the statute neither incorporates that tort nor tracks its elements.
“While we disagree with the Court’s reading of Daniel’s Law on the specific question before it, we look forward to continuing to defend this critical protection for public servants and their families against the data brokers trying to get it struck down,” a spokesperson for the office said in a statement.
The ruling does not resolve whether Daniel’s Law is constitutional. Pierre-Louis said the state court was answering only the statutory question submitted by the Third Circuit, leaving the federal appeals court to decide whether liability without proof of fault violates the First Amendment.
Chief Justice Stuart Rabner and Justice Anne Patterson did not participate.