Kinda surprised and disappointed given the expansive title ("Britain’s scariest libel firm can pursue anyone, anywhere") that it failed to mention any of the laws taken against this sort of business by other countries, with the textbook example being America's SPEECH Act of 2010 [0]. That law makes any foreign defamation claim unenforceable in the US unless it meets the standards of the First Amendment, regardless of the laws anywhere else in the world. Foreigners with lesser free speech protections can pound sand. We could do better with a strong federal anti-SLAPP law, currently how expensive and invasive anti-speech lawsuits are varies wildly more by what state one is resident in then it should. Nevertheless the protections are still quite solid, and I didn't see in the article something to justify the lede. That's not to say the abysmal state of defamation practice in the UK isn't still painful, but it doesn't mean they have total global reach either.<p>----<p>0: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPEECH_Act" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPEECH_Act</a>
"(Truth is always an absolute defence in libel cases.)"<p>In US law, yes. But I thought that was not so under English law. "Mansfield said it, it's true as the Bible/The greater the truth, the greater the libel." was an old summary.
> In the 16th century an additional crime of seditious libel was introduced – statements intended to incite rebellion against a state or monarch. This was punishable by the removal of the offender’s hand. An offence of slander entailed the removal of one’s ears.<p>> Few would argue that libel law shouldn’t exist.<p>Well, maybe more people should argue that, after all, mostly the other few benefit from all this huge power imbalance of being able to chop someone's hand off (or do the modern financial ruin alternative)
What does 'pursue' mean here?<p>Everybody can write an angry letter to 'anyone, anywhere'.<p>Can Carter-Ruck actually force 'anyone, anywhere' to cease & desist / defend themselves at court?<p>What stops a resident of say Hong Kong or Russia or Paraguay from totally ignoring said angry letter?
Something I appreciated from The Economist was this bit<p>> It seemed legitimate to her (an impression aided by the fact that its co-founder, Ruja Ignatova, had addressed a conference organised by The Economist)<p>Admitting their own role in this saga was nice.
My understanding of the strength of British Libel laws is due to them being used to eliminate dueling which was quite prevelant amongst the officer classes in the British Army. They took two measures. One was to ban the military pension of an officer killed in a duel going to their wife, the other was tough libel laws that enabled matters of honour to be settled in a court rather than through a duel. Both of these measures combined to virtually eliminate dueling.
> London’s top libel lawyers command rates of more than £500 per hour.<p>Losers. This guy bills at €1000 / hour.<p><a href="https://www.quinnemanuel.com/attorneys/grosch-dr-marcus/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.quinnemanuel.com/attorneys/grosch-dr-marcus/</a>
Satire and opinion manages to express itself even in the UK. Give the show "Have I Got News for You" a watch before you assume that freedom of expression is completely dead there. That being said, I'm sure it's tough to feel safe unless you can afford good representation.
Over the years, I've come to the strong view that America's free speech protections - more or less unique in the world - are by far the best model.<p>Plenty of other countries gesture at the idea of free expression, even in their constitutions, but in practice it doesn't exist. It becomes illegal to "defame" (or even just "insult") someone by merely expressing an opinion, not making a factually defamatory claim. It's an awful way to run a democratic society.<p>I mean, I could name a bunch of American political podcasts which would have been sued out of existence by the powerful people they joke about in any other country.
Has Britain learned anything from Jimmy Savile (<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile</a>) or have they just accepted this is how it will be? Because their libel laws feel like an important part of how something like that stays covered up.<p>Or are they even allowed to have a serious conversation about it given those very libel laws?