In the years following the landmark United States Supreme Court decision on libel law in New York Times v. Sullivan, the court ruled on a number of additional cases that continued to shape the standards of protected speech. As part of this key series of judgments, the justices explored the contours of the Sullivan ruling and established the definition of “reckless disregard” as it pertains to “actual malice” in the case of St. Amant v. Thompson. While an array of scholarly and legal literature examines Sullivan and some subsequent cases, the St. Amant case—once called “the most important of the recent Supreme Court libel decisions”—has not received the attention it warrants. Eric P. Robinson’s Reckless Disregard corrects this omission with a thorough analysis of the case and its ramifications. The history of St. Amant v. Thompson begins with the contentious 1962 U.S. Senate primary election in Louisiana, between incumbent Russell Long and businessman Philemon “Phil” A. St. Amant. The initial lawsuit stemmed from a televised campaign address in which St. Amant attempted to demonstrate Long’s alleged connections with organized crime and corrupt union officials. Although St. Amant’s claims had no effect on the outcome of the election, a little-noticed statement he made during the address—that money had “passed hands” between Baton Rouge Teamsters leader Ed Partin and East Baton Rouge Parish deputy sheriff Herman A. Thompson—led to a defamation lawsuit that ultimately passed through the legal system to the Supreme Court. A decisive step in the journey toward the robust protections that American courts provide to comments about public officials, public figures, and matters of public interest, St. Amant v. Thompson serves as a significant development in modern American defamation law. Robinson’s study deftly examines the background of the legal proceedings as well as their social and political context. His analysis of how the Supreme Court ruled in this case reveals the justices’ internal deliberations, shedding new light on a judgment that forever changed American libel law.

The modern law of defamation is frequently criticised for being outdated,obscure and even incomprehensible. The Making of the Modern Law of Defamation explains how and why the law has come to be as it is by offering an historical analysis of its development from the seventeenth century to the present day. Whilst the primary focus of the book is the law of England, it also makes extensive use of comparative common law materials from jurisdictions such as Australia, South Africa, the United States and Scotland. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the law of defamation, in media law and in the relationship between free speech and the law.

Written by the widely respected author of The Law of Defamation and the Internet, this book analyses the modern law of defamation in a way that consolidates into a coherent structure its various sources - the common law, earlier statutory reforms, European and other foreign influences, and the changes effected by the Defamation Act 2013. As well as examining the implications of the 2013 reforms, Collins on Defamation dissects, in context, the very large number of ambiguous and contestable questions of construction in, and possibly unintended consequences of, the new law. The book draws on authorities from a wide international research base to explain the application of relevant principles, including the principles applicable to multi-jurisdictional publications and actions involving one or more foreign litigants. As well as providing encyclopaedic analysis of the law of defamation, the work contains detailed coverage of relevant conflict of law principles, and important and emerging related causes of action, including misuse of private information, malicious falsehood, data protection rights, and protection from harassment. Comprehensive tables of recent damages awards, and an extensive set of precedents for common notices and pleadings, are also included. This book is an essential text for any practitioner in the field.

The modern law of defamation is frequently criticised for being outdated, obscure and even incomprehensible. The Making of the Modern Law of Defamation explains how and why the law has come to be as it is by offering an historical analysis of its development from the seventeenth century to the present day. Whilst the primary focus of the book is the law of England, it also makes extensive use of comparative common law materials from jurisdictions such as Australia, South Africa, the United States and Scotland. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the law of defamation, i.

Matthew Collins presents a comprehensive study of the application of defamation laws in the United Kingdom and Australia to material published via the Internet.

A crucial and compelling account of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the landmark Supreme Court case that redefined libel, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning legal journalist Anthony Lewis. The First Amendment puts it this way: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." Yet, in 1960, a city official in Montgomery, Alabama, sued The New York Times for libel—and was awarded $500,000 by a local jury—because the paper had published an ad critical of Montgomery's brutal response to civil rights protests. The centuries of legal precedent behind the Sullivan case and the U.S. Supreme Court's historic reversal of the original verdict are expertly chronicled in this gripping and wonderfully readable book by the Pulitzer Prize Pulitzer Prize–winning legal journalist Anthony Lewis. It is our best account yet of a case that redefined what newspapers—and ordinary citizens—can print or say.

Gradually, the law of tort has shifted away from a strict-liability approach to one where fault predominates. This book charts important case law documenting this shift. It seeks to understand how and why it occurred. Given that the Rylands v Fletcher decision is typically seen as a prime exemplar of strict liability, it focusses particularly on that case, as part of the historical development of tort law. It considers the intellectual arguments made in favour of strict liability, and for fault-based liability. Having done so, it then focusses on particular areas of the law of tort, including nuisance, defamation and trespass. It is somewhat anomalous that though most would view these as examples of torts of strict liability, fault considerations have become prominent in their application. This presents an uneasy compromise, where torts that are notionally strict in nature are infused with fault considerations, often through exceptions or defences. This book advocates for further development in the law of tort to better reflect a primarily fault-based approach to liability, at least in the common law. This would make the law of tort more coherent.

A Modern View of the Law of Torts provides the important aspects of the law of torts, which is an area of law that covers the majority of all civil lawsuits. This book begins with a description of the civil rights of an individual who is wronged by another person, followed by a particular attention to the remedies that are available to people who are wronged by any of the standard torts. Chapters of this book are devoted to specific torts, such as negligence, defamation, and trespass. Specifically, the law of negligence has been fully dealt with, as more and more of the problems of the law of torts are being solved by the courts with reference to the developing principles of the law of negligence. This publication provides an interesting approach to the study of torts, which is equally useful to students and the lay person.

The proposition that the tort of defamation protects reputation has long been axiomatic in the law. The axiom's endurance is surprising: it has long been observed that the law is riddled with inconsistencies and, moreover, the courts and the scholarly literature have rarely discussed exactly what reputation is and how judgments about reputation are made. Reputation and Defamation develops a theory of reputation and uses it to analyse, evaluate and propose a revision of the law. It is the first book to present a comprehensive study of what reputation is, how it functions, and how it is and should be protected under the law. Reputation, it argues, is best understood in terms of the moral judgments a community makes about its members. Viewed in this way it becomes apparent, contrary to the legal orthodoxy, that defamation law did not really aim and function to protect reputation until the early nineteenth century. Unfortunately, the modern common law has not paid sufficient attention to either the nature of reputation or the historical relationship between reputation and defamation. Consequently, the tests for what is defamatory do not always protect reputation adequately or appropriately. The 'shun and avoid' and 'ridicule' tests have developed so that a publication may be actionable even where it does not tend to prompt a negative moral judgment of the plaintiff. These tests should be discarded. The principal 'lowering the estimation' test, however, is for the most part appropriately geared to the protection of reputation. Importantly, the scope of legal protection has been limited. Words will only be actionable if they tend to make 'right-thinking' people think the less of the plaintiff. The values of Christian tradition and Victorian moralism which became embedded in the concept of 'the right-thinking person' are problematic in the current era of moral diversity. A revised legal framework is proposed. It retains the principal test but re-thinks how and why different criteria for moral judgment should - or should not - be recognised when courts determine whether an attack on reputation will be actionable as defamation. It is argued that 'the right-thinking person' should be associated with an inclusive liberal premise of equal moral worth and a shared commitment to moral diversity. The proposed framework demands that when courts recognise values at odds with that premise then such recognition must be justified on sound and expressly stated ethical grounds. That demand serves to protect reputation appropriately and effectively in an age of moral diversity.