I’m teaching a torts course this spring that will include coverage of libel and slander.  These wrongs present particular pedagogic challenges to those of us teaching in the U.S.  Part of the problem is the profound imbalance between the complexity of the doctrine and the contemporary significance of these torts.  Simply put, it’s somewhat difficult to justify a multi-week slog through the ins and outs of common law doctrine, then another slog through elaborate statutory and constitutional overlays, only to end with the punchline that defamation suits comprise a miniscule portion (1%???) of filed tort claims, and that most of these are destined to be dismissed.  Of course that’s not stopping me …..  

 

Another teaching challenge – and the immediate subject of this query – is that of giving students a feel for what it is like, or was like, to live in something very different from the U.S.’s current “anything goes” free speech culture.  Partly for this reason, I plan to include opinions from British, Canadian, and/or Australian courts that demonstrate a bit more solicitude for victims of defamation than is typcial for U.S. courts.   Beyond these, I am looking for news articles, historical treatments, or literary works that vividly depict a social world in which individuals are – for better or worse – very mindful as to how they speak about others, in part because they run the risk of liability or prosecution.   (At the moment, I’m not looking for science fiction accounts of repressive dystopias: a small smattering of U.S. federal court defamation decisions will more than suffice to induce my students toward the view that anyone ought to be able to say anything about anyone without incurring the risk of being the target of legal action.)   

 

To elaborate a bit on what I have in mind:  I may include some historical materials on the loathsome Sedition Act from early U.S. history.  I may also given the students part or all of a long essay in the NY Review of Books from the Guardian’s Editor in Chief.  It recounts the litigation travails his paper endured when sued by a large British firm for a story about the firm’s strategies for setting up tax shelters.  The essay ends, not surprisingly, with a plea for greater press freedom in England.  Here’s the link:  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22245

 

Thanks for any help; feel free to reply on- or off-list.

 

John Goldberg

jgoldberg@law.harvard.edu