And we reverse the District Court's decision to award summary judgment in favor of the individual appellees who held office after 1973, since we do not find that appellants have had sufficient opportunity to take discovery. She stated that the Party considered her to be the person best qualified to respond to the interrogatories. We emphasize, however, that the litigant seeking protection need not prove to a certainty that its First Amendment rights will be chilled by disclosure. "A final example involves two interrogatories in which appellees asked whether Party members were encouraged to give the Party a portion of the proceeds whenever goods were "taken without an exchange of consideration."C. It recognized that the information sought by the defendants went to the heart of their case. THE CLAIM OF A FIFTH AMENDMENT SELF-INCRIMINATIONPlaintiff Huey P. Newton was co-founder of the Black Panther Party. Again, dismissal should be used only as a last resort.Huey Newton claimed the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and refused to answer a number of interrogatories that would have required him to disclose information relating to matters that were the subject of pending criminal prosecutions or pending criminal and civil investigations.Just as appellees argued that an automatic waiver rule should be applied in the First Amendment context, so also they contend that such a rule should be applied in the Fifth Amendment context. In one of its original responses to appellees' interrogatories the Party stated that "the Party is and always has been governed by a fifteen-member body known as the Central Committee. See 4 J. Moore, Federal Practice P 26.60(6) at 252 (1979). He later answered these interrogatories when the charges against him were dismissed. 122-123). They suggested that appellees were deliberately concealing the existence of relevant material. Brown v. United States, Three recent cases discuss other factors.
Appellants also stated that they learned of various actions through independent sources. at 276). In another appellees asked for a list of all offices of the Party newspaper that were alleged to have been vandalized. NAACP is thus not authority for the Black Panthers withholding names of the Party's officers and authorized spokesmen.Moreover, the names of the NAACP's ordinary members had little or no relevance to the lawsuit brought by Alabama against the NAACP; that suit was brought merely because the NAACP had failed to register as a foreign corporation. Elaine Brown also requested $50 million in compensatory and $50 million in punitive damages. Thomas v. United States, supra, 531 F.2d at 749. A balancing test was also used by this court in National Right to Work, supra, where we held that the defendant, the National Right to Work Legal Defense and Educational Fund, could be forced to disclose its contributors only after a detailed inquiry into the other party's need for the information.In fact, a balancing approach has been adopted in cases very similar to this one, where the plaintiff has asserted a First Amendment privilege and refused to make discovery. Therefore, if plaintiff Newton is to proceed with this lawsuit * * * he must answer * * *. This was a civil action on a fire insurance policy where the insurance company alleged arson by the insured as an affirmative defense.Plaintiff's next contention is that the privilege against self-incrimination justifies Kisting's refusal to answer the questions involved. at 1254-1255, that the district court has power to order individual responses, if at all, only under Rule 37(b). Rule 37(b) specifies the sanctions available to the court if a Rule 37(a) order compelling an answer is disobeyed. Appellees argued that there was no evidence showing any continuing harm, and that therefore equitable relief was unwarranted.
For example, see Interrogatories 80 (storing guns and military equipment); 81 (encouraging mutiny in armed forces and killing of Army officers); 89 (killing police officers); 91 (killing president and ex-president); 101 (acquiring and stealing dynamite, bombing of public buildings, etc. It also furnished "the names of all its directors and officers."