BiblioVault - Books about Libel and slander

Bad News Travels Fast

The Telegraph, Libel, and Press Freedom in the Progressive Era

Patrick C. File

University of Massachusetts Press, 2019

At the turn of the twentieth century, American journalists transmitted news across the country by telegraph. But what happened when these stories weren't true? In Bad News Travels Fast, Patrick C. File examines a series of libel cases by a handful of plaintiffs—including socialites, businessmen, and Annie Oakley—who sued newspapers across the country for republishing false newswire reports. Through these cases, File demonstrates how law and technology intertwined to influence debates about reputation, privacy, and the acceptable limits of journalism.

This largely forgotten era in the development of American libel law provides crucial historical context for contemporary debates about the news media, public discourse, and the role of a free press. File argues that the legal thinking surrounding these cases laid the groundwork for the more friendly libel standards the press now enjoys and helped to establish today's regulations of press freedom amid the promise and peril of high-speed communication technology.

[more]

Errors, Lies, and Libel

Peter E. Kane. Foreword by Elmer Gertz

Southern Illinois University Press, 1992

Peter E. Kane takes a critical look at the development of the present law through a discussion of seventeen landmark libel cases.

One of the many points Kane clarifies is the important distinction between an error and a lie when judging whether someone is guilty of libel. For example, in the series of events that led to Goldwater vs. Ginzburg, Ralph Ginzburg, publisher of fact magazine, compiled and printed in fact a montage of quotes he had collected from psychiatrists about Barry Goldwater. It took five years of legal sparring for the courts to conclude that Ginzburg had deliberately published a malicious and irresponsible document and to rule in favor of Goldwater. Kane closes with a discussion of current thinking on possible libel reform.

[more]

In Sullivan's Shadow

The Use and Abuse of Libel Law during the Long Civil Rights Struggle

Aimee Edmondson

University of Massachusetts Press, 2019

For many years, the far right has sown public distrust in the media as a political strategy, weaponizing libel law in an effort to stifle free speech and silence African American dissent. In Sullivan's Shadow demonstrates that this strategy was pursued throughout the civil rights era and beyond, as southern officials continued to bring lawsuits in their attempts to intimidate journalists who published accounts of police brutality against protestors. Taking the Supreme Court's famous 1964 case New York Times v. Sullivan as her starting point, Aimee Edmondson illuminates a series of fascinating and often astounding cases that preceded and followed this historic ruling.

Drawing on archival research and scholarship in journalism, legal history, and African American studies, Edmondson offers a new narrative of brave activists, bold journalists and publishers, and hardheaded southern officials. These little-known courtroom dramas at the intersection of race, libel, and journalism go beyond the activism of the 1960s and span much of the country's history, beginning with lawsuits filed against abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and concluding with a suit spawned by the 1988 film Mississippi Burning.

[more]

Insult to Injury

Libel, Slander, and Invasions of Privacy

Christa Jones

University Press of Colorado, 2003

William K. Jones reviews the seminal US Supreme Court decisions that restrict the First Amendment in order to protect persons against defamatory falsehoods, invasions of privacy, and related psychic harm. Covering cases ranging from a restaurant owner dri

[more]

A New England Prison Diary

Slander, Religion, and Markets in Early America

Martin J. Hershock

University of Michigan Press, 2012

In 1812, New Hampshire shopkeeper Timothy M. Joy abandoned his young family, fleeing the creditors who threatened to imprison him. Within days, he found himself in a Massachusetts jailhouse, charged with defamation of a prominent politician. During the months of his incarceration, Joy kept a remarkable journal that recounts his personal, anguished path toward spiritual redemption. Martin J. Hershock situates Joy's account in the context of the pugnacious politics of the early republic, giving context to a common citizen's perspective on partisanship and the fate of an unfortunate shopkeeper swept along in the transition to market capitalism.

In addition to this close-up view of an ordinary person's experience of a transformative period, Hershock reflects on his own work as a historian. In the final chapter, he discusses the value of diaries as historical sources, the choices he made in telling Joy's story, alternative interpretations of the diary, and other contexts in which he might have placed Joy's experiences. The appendix reproduces Joy's original journal so that readers can develop their own skills using a primary source.

[more]

The Offensive Internet

Speech, Privacy, and Reputation

Saul Levmore

Harvard University Press, 2012

The Internet has been romanticized as a zone of freedom. The alluring combination of sophisticated technology with low barriers to entry and instantaneous outreach to millions of users has mesmerized libertarians and communitarians alike. Lawmakers have joined the celebration, passing the Communications Decency Act, which enables Internet Service Providers to allow unregulated discourse without danger of liability, all in the name of enhancing freedom of speech. But an unregulated Internet is a breeding ground for offensive conduct.

At last we have a book that begins to focus on abuses made possible by anonymity, freedom from liability, and lack of oversight. The distinguished scholars assembled in this volume, drawn from law and philosophy, connect the absence of legal oversight with harassment and discrimination. Questioning the simplistic notion that abusive speech and mobocracy are the inevitable outcomes of new technology, they argue that current misuse is the outgrowth of social, technological, and legal choices. Seeing this clearly will help us to be better informed about our options.

In a field still dominated by a frontier perspective, this book has the potential to be a real game changer. Armed with example after example of harassment in Internet chat rooms and forums, the authors detail some of the vile and hateful speech that the current combination of law and technology has bred. The facts are then treated to analysis and policy prescriptions. Read this book and you will never again see the Internet through rose-colored glasses.

[more]

Slandering the Sacred

Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India

J. Barton Scott

University of Chicago Press, 2023

A history of global secularism and political feeling through colonial blasphemy law.

Why is religion today so often associated with giving and taking offense? To answer this question, Slandering the Sacred invites us to consider how colonial infrastructures shaped our globalized world. Through the origin and afterlives of a 1927 British imperial law (Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code), J. Barton Scott weaves a globe-trotting narrative about secularism, empire, insult, and outrage. Decentering white martyrs to free thought, his story calls for new histories of blasphemy that return these thinkers to their imperial context, dismantle the cultural boundaries of the West, and transgress the borders between the secular and the sacred as well as the public and the private.

[more]