Modern Vespa

Unbelievable.

After our own recent run-in with legal threats from across the Atlantic (see Notice of Compliance with Cease & Desist Order) I've just come across another fine example of UK lawyers who have not yet gotten the memo that suing US entities for libel / defamation is a waste of time and money. Apparently, they're quite happy to charge their clients for performing a service that has no legal validity. In this case, the plaintiff is demanding that the site TechDirt be shut down.

This is really starting to piss me off, actually. I would not be the least bit surprised to hear that UK courts are still willing to take this kind of case, with the US parties being tried in absentia for violation of laws that don't apply to them.

Legal Threat Demands We Shut Down Techdirt

I sure hope that they don't cave (doesn't sound like they will). Would be nice if the UK courts allow duped people to be made whole when these asshole lawyers take their money knowing full well that there is no case to be made.

The client and his legal team must be daft for bringing up something 6 years old. Anyway I always wanted to use the word daft in a sentence.

bet it is a scam bs job being done in the UK.

And here thought US lawyers were the meanest sharks in the pool....

Or maybe the smartest?

Perhaps a lot of lawyers out of work?

Funny.

R

8)

Why is anyone paying any attention to this?
UK lawyers have no jurisdiction in the US. For them to force an issue they would have to come to the US and file papers in a US court. And to do so they would have to hire a US legal team as they are not part of the US Bar association.
They'd never spend the money.

Am I off base here?

Yes, almost. Until the SPEECH act was signed into federal law this month, US entities were being taken to court in the UK (sometimes even by non-UK entities) and successfully sued for defamation. US treaties allowed UK courts to recover financial judgements from US citizens and businesses, even if they had no presence at all in the UK. It was a travesty of the First Amendment.

Apparently lawyers in the UK don't know about the new SPEECH law, which holds that US courts will not honor financial judgements against US entities for foreign defamation suits unless the courts apply a standard of free speech equal to or greater than that which is guaranteed by the US constitution.

Well, they didn't recover under treaties, they recovered under comity if they recovered at all. In general the parties that had UK judgments enforced would have recovered anyway under US libel/slander law, and the winning parties in those cases that were 'uniquely British' were unable to recover. That sort of forum shopping was dangerous primarily for multinationals. While the British libel laws are antiquated and ludicrous, they never posed a real danger to anyone whose assets are entirely stateside.

I don't believe that's actually the case. Six US states (including NY, the first) passed legislation specifically aimed to preventing foreign courts from recovering defamation awards before federal legislation was signed into law. This would tend to suggest that there was actually an open hole that threatened US citizens.

The case of Rachel Ehrenfeld in particular seems to demonstrate that the UK courts could, in fact, sue US citizens with the presumption of guilt being upon the defendant.