International and comparative perspectives on defamation, free speech and privacy

by Russell L. Weaver* and David F. Partlett**
New York Law School Law Review | 2005/2006

* Professor of Law and Distinguished University Scholar, University of Louisville, Louis D. Brandeis School of Law.

** Vice President, Dean, and Professor of Law, Washington and Lee University School of Law.

Text: 3,772 words
SUMMARY:
… More than four decades have elapsed since the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan and time has given way to deeper reflection. … Sullivan involved the free speech rights of activists in the civil rights movement and the Alabama defamation law challenged in Sullivan had little salience in the vortex of that struggle. … ” Professor Eugenie Brouillet in Free Speech, Reputation, and the Canadian Balance also focuses on the Canadian approach to reputation and speech and agrees that Canada has struck a different balance than the United States. … In our article Defamation, Free Speech, and Democratic Governance, we discuss how Australia and England rejected Sullivan in favor of a speech-enhancing doctrine based on extensions of common law qualified privilege. … ” The article examines how the Australian and English extensions of common law qualified privilege affect media reporting and contrasts their impact with that of the Sullivan decision. … Professor Clive Walker in Reforming the Crime of Libel focuses on criminal libel rather than civil libel. … Today, however, they are of greater importance as we see that ideas about reputation, privacy, and free speech are fluid and subject to much practical contention. …
Citation:
n48. Ehrenfeld v. Mahfouz, 2005 WL 696769 (S.D.N.Y. Mar. 23, 2005) (granting a motion to effect service of process). See also Sara Ivry, Seeking U.S. Turf for a Free-Speech Flight, N.Y. Times, Apr. 4, 2005, at C8; Dominic Kennedy, Libel and Money – Why British Courts are Choice of the World, Times (UK), May 19, 2005, at 6; Dominic Kennedy, Judge Attacks Author Over Libel Tourism Allegation, Times (UK), June 16, 2005, at 24; Alyssa A. Lappen, Libel Wars, FrontPage Mag., July 18, 2005; Jeffrey Toobin, Let’s Go: Libel, The New Yorker, Aug. 8, 2005, at 36.


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Alyssa A. Lappen is a U.S.-based investigative journalist. She is the former Managing Editor at the Leeb Group (2012-2017); a former Senior Fellow of the American Center for Democracy (2005-2008); and a former Senior Editor of Institutional Investor (1993-1999), Working Woman (1991-1993) and Corporate Finance (1991). She served six of her 12 years at Forbes (1978-1990) as an Associate Editor. Ms. Lappen was also a staff reporter at The New Haven Register (1975-1977). During a decade as a freelance, her work appeared in Big Peace, Pajamas Media, Front Page Magazine, American Thinker, Right Side News, Family Security Matters, the Washington Times and many other Internet and print journals. Ms. Lappen also contributed to the Terror Finance Blog, among others. She supports the right of journalists worldwide to write without fear or restriction on politics, governments, international affairs, terrorism, terror financing and religious support for terrorism, among other subjects. Ms. Lappen is also an accomplished poet. Her first full-length collection, The Minstrel's Song, was published by Cross-Cultural Communications in April 2015. Her poems have been published in the 2nd 2007 edition of Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust and both 2007 issues of Wales' award-winning Seventh Quarry: Swansea Poetry Magazine. Dozens of her poems have appeared in print and online literary journals and books. She won the 2000 annual Ruah: A Journal of Spiritual Poetry chapbook award and has received a Harvard Summer Poetry Prize and several honorable mentions.

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