Comment by leobg
2 years ago
Wow. What a refreshing directness:
> He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
How come they could publish this without getting sued into oblivion?
There's a little known law in the USA which states the following;
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
It's not always followed but it does remain fairly important in the mind of American citizens
The first amendment prevents censorship, by the US government, of the press or individual speech. It doesn't prevent an individual or legal person from suing over something written or said in public about them.
What would stop the Atlantic from "getting sued into oblivion" is that the person that the article was about (Nixon) was dead when it was written, and the dead can't be defamed.
> The first amendment prevents censorship, by the US government, of the press or individual speech. It doesn't prevent an individual or legal person from suing over something written or said in public about them.
It doesn’t prevent them from suing,
It does, within its scope, prevent the US or (because the same rule is incorporated against the states under the 14th) any state government from giving them a legal basis for winning a suit, though, which the target of a suit is free to point out to the court to get the case dismissed. This is why the scope if defamation is much narrower in the US then in the British law it inherited.
And, in some US jurisdictions, the target mught also be able to recover damages from the filer of the original suit under anti-SLAPP. laws.
The first amendment still applies because defamation wouldn't be illegal without the US government passing a law to make it illegal. That means that the US's defamation laws can only restrict speech within the very narrow exceptions to the first amendment that courts have allowed.
The bar is especially high for defamation of public figures like Nixon. For something to be defamation against a public figure, it not only has to be provably false; it has to be intentionally and maliciously false. They would have to prove that the author intentionally was spreading false information to hurt the subject. That is so difficult to do that defamation suits regarding public figures are almost never successful.
The 1st amendment only exists because it’s an ideal which many Americans value.
It doesn’t matter if “well it’s not technically illegal because it’s not the government”, people don’t like censorship either way.
If your only defense of [corp/group] is that “well technically their suppression isn’t against the law” you’re probably on the wrong side.
It's also more or less opinion, which categorically is not defamation in the US, dead or not.
> The first amendment prevents censorship, by the US government
How would lawsuits work without the government being involved?
Public figures, especially elected officials, have a significantly reduced protections from defamation in the US.
Not only is truth an absolute defense to defamation in the US, the plaintiff must show that the defendant's statements were made with actual malice if the plaintiff is a public official. Merely being unsure if something is true or being negligent in determining the truth of it is not sufficient.
Furthermore, nearly all civil lawsuits require that actual damages be done in order to have standing at all. That is, you need a dollar amount because that's basically the only remedy that a civil court can make. That means that if the damage is due to lost reputation and your reputation has already been thoroughly soiled, it will be incredibly difficult to put a dollar amount to it.
So:
1. It has to be actually false as shown by the plaintiff
2. It has to be known by the defendant to be false as shown by the plaintiff
3. It has to be made intentionally to harm the subject as shown by the plaintiff
4. The statements must have actually harmed the subject in monetary terms as shown by the plaintiff
In Germany, it is literally the authorities and conscientious journalist, who live in fear of being sued by the criminals, rather than the criminals being in fear of being sued themselves.
It is agonizing to watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-3-9vtpjdU
You can't libel the dead
The dead have estates.
They're not saying there's no one to sue. It's that as libel and slander are legally defined, they don't apply to the dead. The estates have no standing for a suit.
As an outsider, it seems like the lawyer population must be approaching 100% of Americans soon.
Is there anything or anyone Americans can't sue?
2 replies →
Except in the Philippines, where it is a crime to commit libel/slander against a dead person (under Art. 353 of the Revised Penal Code). Although actual lawsuits from the family of a dead person are quite rare.
The judge who would give them punitive fines and forcing them to pay opposing party expenses.
A. Different times. B. Hunter was a bit of a hack who was not taken seriously. His work is just a couple notches above mad magazine. It is entertaining satire that is obviously without connection to reality.
I say this as a big fan of his work; but it is not to be taken seriously.