Libel And Slander Research Articles

REVERSING THE TAXES APPROACH FOR A WIN-WIN TOBACCO CONTROL POLICY

Increasing the price of cigarettes is a core ingredient of comprehensive tobacco control 1. There is long-standing evidence of the effectiveness of increased tobacco prices for reducing tobacco consumption. In developed countries, a roughly 10% rise in price decreases sales by 4% 2. Therefore, tobacco tax increases apparently offer a win–win solution, because states will collect more taxes and the burden of smoking-related illnesses will decrease 3. France has become an exception among rich countries by flying in the face of this evidence. In 2004 Jean Pierre Raffarin, Jacques Chirac's Prime Minister, announced a freeze on tobacco taxes for 4 years—‘a good compromise’, according to the president of the Tobacconists Union. On 30 May 2011 Xavier Bertand, the Minister of Heath, announced that he will maintain the freeze, even though France has seen a 2% increase in smoking prevalence during the past 5 years. Warnings from public health experts have fallen on deaf ears. Accordingly, turnover of the tobacco industry has shown a 3% rise from 2008 to 2009, despite the global economic crisis. The French government seems more interested in promoting the profits of the tobacco industry than in the health of its people. Ironically, it would probably pay governments to hand money over to the tobacco industry to incentivize a reduction their turnover. The turnover of the tobacco industry in France is about €1 billion, while at the same time France spends €47 billion a year treating smoking-related illnesses and only collects €12 billion in taxes 4. Each Euro paid to the shareholders represents €10 paid by the smoker and a cost of €350 to the community (the cost of treating smoking-related illnesses minus collected taxes). If the state were to pay €10 to the shareholders for each €10 decrease in tobacco industry turnover, it would save €340 for the community. A Pay4Decrease plan of this kind is unlikely ever to be put into place and would no doubt have unintended adverse consequences, but the arithmetic shows how much damage the tobacco industry is doing to society and the dereliction in duty of governments such as that in France, who are not engaging with even the most basic policies to protect their citizens. Dr Braillon, a senior tenured consultant in Public Health was sacked in 2010 from Amiens University Hospital by the French Department of Health against the advice of the National Statutory Committee (Abuse of libel laws and a sacking: the gagging of public health experts in France. Tobacco control blog, 8 November 2010: http://blogs.bmj.com/tc/2010/11/08/) (Archived by Webcite at http://www.webcitation.org/617xxNddg).

THE HABIBI LIBEL TRIAL: DEFAMATION AND THE HIDDEN-COMMUNITY BASIS OF CRIMINAL LAW

Does the link between national community and criminal law reflect a practical limitation on the jurisdiction of domestic courts or is there a more intrinsic relation between the two? This question stands at the centre of the ongoing debate over the principle of universal jurisdiction – the ability of third-party national courts to adjudicate criminal cases that involve communities outside their territories. This article suggests that we can find the key for understanding the community basis of criminal law in the neighbouring field of libel law. At its centre stands the libel trial of Emile Habibi against the editors of Al-Sinara that took place in 1988–90. Libel law provides an interesting arena for exploring the community component of criminal law, as it takes its guidelines for recognizing defamation from an ‘imagined community.’ Habibi, an Arab citizen of Israel, a writer, and a political leader, was accused by the editors of Al-Sinara of having collaborated with the Zionist forces during the war of 1948 and having thereby contributed to the Palestinian Nakba (the catastrophe). Habibi sued in an Israeli court, arguing that such accusations amounted to defamation. The case raises several fundamental issues: can the story of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 be told in an Israeli court? what are the normative implications of recognizing this narrative? and more broadly, are national courts capable of distancing themselves from the demands of ‘heroic history’ and recounting the perspective of the defeated? As the article shows, the legal process offers moments of subversion and resistance and invites the court to acknowledge the ramifications of adhering to the hegemonic Zionist narrative of the 1948 war.

The Economics of Badmouthing: Libel Law and the Underworld of the Financial Press in France Before World War I

This article analyzes the economics of “badmouthing” in the context of the pre-1914 French capital market. We argue that badmouthing was a means through which racketeering journals sought to secure property rights over issuers' reputation. We provide a theoretical study of the market setup that emerged to deal with such problems, and we test our predictions using new evidence from contemporary sources.“A newspaper that wishes to make its fortune should never waste its columns and weary its readers by praising anything. Eulogy is invariably dull—a fact that Mr. Alf had discovered and utilized.”A. Trollope, The Way We Live Now, 1875“And did you threaten him with the newspapers?”H. de Balzac, La maison Nucingen, 1837

English libel law is not fit for purpose

The libel laws of England and Wales are outdated, unfair and too expensive.They are being used by rich and powerful bullies to shut down critical discussions of products, medicine, corporations and community issues.The UK Government published a draft Defamation Bill in March 2011 in response to a public campaign objecting to the stifling of these discussions.The proposals in the draft bill need to be strengthened and clarified to ensure final legislation fully protects citizens’ rights and the public interest.

The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law and the Roman à Clef (review)

Reviewed by: The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law and the Roman à Clef Nick Turner Sean Latham. The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law and the Roman à Clef. New York : Oxford UP, 2009. xiii + 202 pp. Modernism and celebrity culture: here are two areas we might not expect to see side by side in a monograph, unless one were being argued against the other. But, in this fascinating study, Sean Latham proves that modernism did not entirely distance itself from the lower end of the marketplace and that it often infiltrated the commercial arena by way of that slippery and louche genre known as the roman à clef. Modernism, continually elastic in its definitions and the periods of time it occupies, is now seen to be infected by a new area: gossip and scandal. The roman à clef, as Latham defines it, is “a creative and stubbornly persistent counter-form to the novel” (25). Finding its first [End Page 366] example in France in the seventeenth century, Latham associates it with the upper classes, and argues that it is characterized by Genette’s idea of “conditional fictionality” and an ever-growing anarchic skepticism (16). It blurs and challenges the boundaries between fact and fiction and requires a key to understand it: the recognition of the people behind the characters. What Latham seeks to demonstrate—and he succeeds totally—is that the roman à clef does not shadow the development of the novel like some disreputable sibling, but feeds it in its most experimental period. Neglected and ignored by academics still laboring under the anxieties about art that modernism promoted, this genre should clearly be seen as an important part of literary history. Latham makes his case by telling what is in effect the history of the roman à clef at its key points, beginning with the rise of the novel in England, and then moving on to the end of the nineteenth century and the contrasting—but here complementary—cases of Oscar Wilde and Sigmund Freud. He then inserts a chapter on libel and its background, before examining how James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis fared under charges of libel. Latham then turns to a discussion of the work of modernists, both canonical and minor, via some highly entertaining documentation of the many writers queuing up to write roman à clefs about Lady Ottoline Morrell. There is close reference to texts from Robinson Crusoe and The Picture of Dorian Gray through to Huxley’s Crome Yellow and Those Barren Leaves, Joyce’s Dubliners and Ulysses, Lawrence’s Women in Love and the work of Jean Rhys and Osbert Sitwell. This is an ambitious book that covers a great deal of ground; it is interdisciplinary, owing to the legal knowledge it shows, and it spans large periods of time. This ambition should be applauded. Latham writes with sophistication and intelligence, but is always readable and clear; the evidence is extremely detailed, and his knowledge of texts and their critics—including those outside the modernist era—highly assured. But what really marks this work is that (springing from the successfully large claims he makes for the roman à clef) it can be partly read as a new history of the novel, for Latham’s study tells a new story about the novel’s beginnings. “By writing deliberately defamatory works lightly cloaked in the roman à clef’s ‘conditional fictionality,’“ the author suggests, modernist writers “exploited the genre’s potential to disrupt the legal, moral and aesthetic compromises that underwrote the novel’s rise in the eighteenth century” (86). Within the chapters, and his close readings of the texts, Latham makes some fascinating claims. Why, for example, do we still use the French term for the genre, he wonders? It is as if we want to distance ourselves from it even in its naming. The Puritanism associated with [End Page 367] the rise of the novel is still subtly alive and well, perhaps. He also makes the obvious but easy to forget point that the publicity attached to Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Ulysses, in terms of censorship, has obscured the legal stories of other works. Demonstrating this, he shows how many roman à clefs play a Chinese box game, where they...

The human rights case for libel law reforms in the Commonwealth Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI)

The state of defamation laws within the Commonwealth poses a significant threat to the right to freedom of speech, expression and information. Within the United Kingdom there is a growing movement for the reform of the procedural aspects of libel law following several high profile cases that have brought the public’s attention to a number of problems within existing libel law.1 In Jamaica, criminal defamation laws are facing reform and the recommendations for change are continuing to make their way through the legislative process. The pernicious effects of libel actions are amplified within small jurisdictions and there is a serious danger that the crippling penalties on defendants as a result of such actions ‘chill’ free speech and stifle dissent.2 The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) an independent NGO working for Human Rights in the Commonwealth, presented a paper to the 2010 Meeting of Law Ministers and Attorneys General of Small Commonwealth Jurisdictions (LMSCJ) on the human rights case for libel law reform in small jurisdictions.3 This is a summary of the research and the paper presented at the LMSCJ meeting. The basic findings were that the presence of criminal defamation laws on the statute books and procedural aspects of civil defamations laws posed a threat to the realisation of freedom of speech and CHRI put a series of recommendations to the delegates calling for reform in these areas. 1 Significant concern surrounded the judgment in this case and the question of costs MGN Limited v the United Kingdom – 39401/04 [2011] ECHR 66 (18 January 2011). 2Guardian editorial, ‘Press freedom: The Singapore grip’ The Guardian (17 November 2010) <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/17/press-freedom-singapore-grip> 3Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, ‘Overview of Media Freedom and Defamation: The Human Rights case for Libel Law Reforms in the Commonwealth’ (LMSCJ Paper, Commonwealth, Secretariat, Marlborough House, London). This paper was produced at the London officer of CHRI – written by Frederick Cowell with research assistance from Catherine Fischl, Alix Langrounat and Sirintiya Robberts.

World Map of Libel Tourism and Defamation Law in Israel

World Map of Libel Tourism and Defamation Law in Israel

Freddie Starr ate my privacy: OK!

The development of the concept of privacy in English law has been heavily influenced by the existence of two mature and specialist areas of law. Libel law has traditionally focused on reputational privacy. Equitable remedies, such as breach of confidence, have broadened to protect seclusional privacy. These two areas of law – now developing through case law reflecting Articles 8 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights – are coalescing. This may lead to greater use of ‘responsible journalism’ techniques that address issues arising where prior notification of breaches of reputational or seclusional privacy becomes the norm.

In Sullivan's Shadow

This article examines the use of libel in the shadow of the landmark New York Times v. Sullivan case in 1964. By exploring lesser-known cases, scholars can better understand the impact that libel had on the fight for civil rights in the South. Legal historians agree Sullivan stopped what would have been an onslaught of libel suits for civil rights coverage, but research has been scarce on similar, lesser-known suits and their impact on delaying coverage of the movement. The Supreme Court's decision opened the doors for the press to cover demonstrations and activities in the South, but this study shows that Sullivan was only one such libel case that offered consequences for coverage of the movement. Sullivan-like cases took much longer to move through the courts than scholars have realized and played an integral role in shaping coverage of the issue.

The Problem of Trans-National Libel

Forum shopping in trans-national libel cases – “libel tourism” – has a chilling effect on journalism, academic scholarship, and scientific criticism. The United States and Britain (the most popular venue for such cases) have recently attempted to address the issue legislatively. In 2010, the U.S. passed the SPEECH Act, which prohibits recognition and enforcement of libel judgments from jurisdictions applying law less protective than the First Amendment. On March 15, 2011, the British Ministry of Justice proposed a draft Defamation Act 2011 with provisions designed, inter alia, to discourage libel tourism. This Article questions the extent to which the SPEECH Act and the proposed Defamation Act 2011 will accomplish their stated aims. The SPEECH Act provides little protection for hard-hitting investigative and accountability journalism by professional news organizations with global assets. The proposed British bill has important substantive limits and, controversial in Britain, may well not be adopted. Even if Parliament approves it, the site of libel tourism may shift to other claimant-friendly jurisdictions. Global harmonization of libel law is neither realistically feasible nor desirable. Instead, this Article proposes a two-fold approach. On the legal front, it supports the procedural focus of Britain’s proposed bill, but also calls for foreign courts to apply a governmental interest analysis to choice of law in trans-national defamation cases threatening core political speech in the United States. On the policy front, it calls for: 1) measures to improve the way in which the press does its job in order to reduce the number of trans-national libel cases; and 2) new approaches to help defend the claims when they are brought. The recommended press-improvement measures include expanded access to, and efficient use of, documents, journalistic self-criticism, and best-practices education. The defense measures explored include the development of alternative, community-based support for libel defense funds; the formation of pro bono libel review consortia; and the promotion of the availability of libel insurance by means designed to help insurers more accurately assess libel risk.

The Problem of Trans-National Libel

Forum shopping in trans-national libel cases – “libel tourism” – has a chilling effect on journalism, academic scholarship, and scientific criticism. The United States and Britain (the most popular venue for such cases) have recently attempted to address the issue legislatively. In 2010, the U.S. passed the SPEECH Act, which prohibits recognition and enforcement of libel judgments from jurisdictions applying law less protective than the First Amendment. On March 15, 2011, the British Ministry of Justice proposed a draft Defamation Act 2011 with provisions designed, inter alia, to discourage libel tourism. This Article questions the extent to which the SPEECH Act and the proposed Defamation Act 2011 will accomplish their stated aims. The SPEECH Act provides little protection for hard-hitting investigative and accountability journalism by professional news organizations with global assets. The proposed British bill has important substantive limits and, controversial in Britain, may well not be adopted. Even if Parliament approves it, the site of libel tourism may shift to other claimant-friendly jurisdictions. Global harmonization of libel law is neither realistically feasible nor desirable. Instead, this Article proposes a two-fold approach. On the legal front, it supports the procedural focus of Britain’s proposed bill, but also calls for foreign courts to apply a governmental interest analysis to choice of law in trans-national defamation cases threatening core political speech in the United States. On the policy front, it calls for: 1) measures to improve the way in which the press does its job in order to reduce the number of trans-national libel cases; and 2) new approaches to help defend the claims when they are brought. The recommended press-improvement measures include expanded access to, and efficient use of, documents, journalistic self-criticism, and bestpractices education. The defense measures explored include the development of alternative, community-based support for libel defense funds; the formation of pro bono libel review consortia; and the promotion of the availability of libel insurance by means designed to help insurers more accurately assess libel risk. * Professor of Law, University of Miami School of Law. Many thanks to Caroline Bradley, Adam Candeub, Mary Doyle, Bernie Oxman, Jan Paulsson, Robin Schard, Steve Schnably, Ralph Shalom and Nicolo Trocker for extremely helpful conversations and comments, and to Pam Lucken for last-minute research help. I am also indebted to Derek Bambauer and Anupam Chander for thoughtful questions at the Bits Without Borders Conference at MSU in October 2010 where I presented early thoughts on the subject. All errors are my own.

The effects of the English libel laws on medicine and research – a personal view

Dr Peter Wilmshurst is a consultant cardiologist. He is a leader in his field, and also a whistleblower, drawing attention to that which he believes to be wrong. He was presented with the HealthWatch Award 2003. Peter Wilmshurst has clashed with universities, editors, the medical establishment, and – perhaps inevitably – with the pharmaceutical industry. It is this last encounter that has taken him to court and that has made explicit and very public the relevance of the UK's libel laws to scientific research.

The effects of the English libel laws on the freedom to publish – a view from the publishing industry

Emily Cleevely is the Head of Public Affairs at the Publishers Association, the UK's leading publishing trade body. She has worked alongside the Libel Reform Campaign since starting this role with the Publishers Association, addressing the Campaign's anniversary event alongside Lord McNally, the Justice minister, and Richard Allan of Facebook.

The effects of the English libel laws on medicine and research – a student's view

Jay Stone is a final year Ph.D. student based at the Institute of Ophthalmology in London. She is attempting to identify novel therapeutic targets for the treatment of vascular proliferation in retinal disease. She believes that to be effective in the laboratory, scientists need to communicate their work to all audiences. She currently writes articles for the British Society of Cell Biology and BioNews.

Alcohol control policy: evidence‐based medicine versus evidence‐based marketing

Comprehensive and stringent alcohol control policies (e.g. on both availability and marketing) are associated with lower alcohol consumption by adolescents 1. Accordingly, Müller et al. showed that the German experience of alcopops taxes, a limited action, induced a switch for beverages associated with riskier drinking patterns 2. French policy has chosen another way. In June 2009, the government issued a new law, ‘Hospital, patients, health and territories’, a major reform to ‘improve’ the health-care system, which allowed advertising for alcohol on the internet, the most used medium by young people. This (i) disregarded both medical associations' claims and results of public polls indicating that eight out of 10 French citizens oppose such a measure and (ii) almost nullified ‘Evin's law’ issued in 1991 to ban or limit alcohol advertising in other media and during sports events 3, 4. The Department of Health took specific measures because the Code of Public Health has a chapter (III) requiring the ‘protection of the under-aged’ in the section entitled ‘Fighting alcoholism’. It issued mandatory posters (31 January 2010) to be posted in places where alcohol is sold 5. Under the headline of ‘To protect the youngest and against public drunkenness’, they have three points, such as: (i) it is forbidden to sell alcohol to those under 18s; (ii) ‘happy hours’ are forbidden unless there are non-alcoholic beverages; and (iii) drunkenness is forbidden in public places 5. The first point of the poster might look fine. In Florida and many other states, trade organizations and retailers have opposed measures that limit youth access, including punishment of vendors making under-age sales 6. Would they have opposed such measures if these measures were not decreasing their sales? Sadly, the efficiency of the first point is very highly questionable in France, because laxity and impunity prevail on enforcement. For example, selling tobacco was forbidden for the under-16s (the ‘Hospital, patients, health and territories’ law also shifted this ban to 18 years). However, the European Project on Alcohol and Drugs (ESPAD) study showed that 65% of the 13-year-old daily smokers (10% of this age) buy their cigarettes from a tobacconist [Bulletin épidémiologie hebdomadaire (BEH thématique), issue 21–22, 27 May 2008, p. 189]. In France, there are no mechanisms to ensure that these laws are enforced and no administration uses sting operations even if serious breaches are patent. On 18 October, the Ministry of Health announced a 2% increase in tobacco sales during the past 5 years ‘due to women and the crisis’, without noting that the French government had consistently refused to increase tobacco taxes since 2004. French health policy is flying in the face of best evidence for reducing tobacco and alcohol consumption, already sliding down what appears to be a slippery slope in terms of smoking, suggesting a willingness to sacrifice its citizens' health. Professor Dubois chairs ‘Alliance Prévention Alcool’, a charity established in June 2010 to federate the organizations that oppose dangerous and inconsistent policies. He is currently being sued for libel by the Confédération des Buralistes (the French tobacconists' union) since September 2009. Dr Braillon, a senior tenured consultant in Professor Dubois' unit at Amiens since 2005, was sacked in December 2009 with the approval of the National Management Centre (Department of Health) against the advice of the National Statutory Committee (Whistleblowing and the abuse of libel law: view from France; HealthWatch, issue 79, October 2010; available at: http://href.fr/healthwatch_oct10.pdf).

Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England: The Subtle Art of Division (review)

Reviewed by: Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England: The Subtle Art of Division Cyndia Susan Clegg Randy Robertson . Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England: The Subtle Art of Division. University Park: Pennsylvania State, 2009. Pp. xv + 272. $75. Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England asserts that "the seventeenth century was 'censorship's great moment,'" at least in England. So great, indeed, was the English government's use of "licensing and exemplary punishment" that it had a "chilling effect" on authors, printers, and publishers. The study's central focus is on individual authors' responses—rhetorical, artistic, and political—to the system of constraints. The authors Mr. Robertson considers—William Prynne, Richard Lovelace, Milton, Marvell, Dryden, and Swift—along with the strategy of focusing on single texts by these authors (Histrio-mastix, Lucasta, Areopagitica, Second Advice to a Painter, Absalom and Achitophel, and A Tale of a Tub, respectively) affords this book's reader the sense of an encounter with reflections on the variety of censorship's literary and cultural implications. The chapters, although chronological, do not insist on a linear movement through the rigors of and literary responses to press censorship—albeit the first example certainly dwells on the theme of harshness that is implicit throughout the study. The clever reading of Histrio-mastix establishes not only that Prynne was censured (and the book censored), but also that the conflict between Charles I and Prynne over an anti-theatrical book was a precursor to the larger conflict between Charles and the Puritans, epitomized by the closing of theaters in 1642. Both Roger L'Estrange, surveyor of the imprimery, and the 1662 Licensing Act addressed the question of authorial responsibility; indeed, L'Estrange referred to authors as "the Fountain of our Troubles." The act required that an author's name be declared in the licensing process if the licenser called for it. As a result of the act and L'Estrange's zealous pursuit of authors, anonymous publication soared—so much so that authors deployed anonymity as a rhetorical device. For instance, in the anonymous publication of Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, the poet laureate took on a highly charged political event, the Exclusion Crisis, with an attack on its Whig architects that, he said, was meant to appeal to the "moderate sort." Anonymity here, says Mr. Robertson, gave him the "veneer of objectivity" at the same time that it taunted the Whigs. "It is as if Dryden was laying down the gauntlet to the opposition, daring them to trace Absalom's lines to their source. . . . In effect, Dryden attained the recognition he merited for his poem (the celebrity and notoriety) without having to pay the price in a London courtroom." He was, however, as Mr. Robertson demonstrates, the subject of censure. Writers on both sides of the political spectrum appropriated Dryden's anonymous poem to their own political purposes, with the Whigs deftly attacking Dryden, even without naming him. [End Page 84] The expiration of the licensing act in 1695 led to dramatic changes in print culture: "pamphlets, newspapers, and religious treatises (including Deistic tracts) multiplied; the print trade expanded in London and struck root in the provinces—conditions that were not loved by all. Swift, Pope, and their Scriblerian kindred regarded the new conditions as creating a cultural swamp, one that teemed with lesser literary species." Mr. Robertson directly links A Tale of a Tub to the licensing act's expiration and the conditions this created. He connects the Tale to censorship in two ways: first, in its effort "to eliminate the plague of hacks and dunces loosed by the decline of press controls"; second, to "lash writers" into religious conformity and to "shame readers into submission." In the latter, Mr. Robertson contends, Swift's Tale is comparable to Hobbes's Leviathan. In the Tale and the Battle of the Books "Swift like Hobbes, is for moderation, centrism, and Anglicanism; his opponents, the Grubaeans, are for extremism, party writing, dissent, and recusancy." Even though the licensing law had expired, Mr. Robertson says that Swift wrote in the shadow of another kind of censorship, the libel laws, that led to the Tale's anonymous publication. When Swift's...

The Habibi libel trial: Defamation and the hidden-community basis of criminal law

Does the link between national community and criminal law reflect a practical limitation on the jurisdiction of domestic courts or is there a more intrinsic relation between the two? This question stands at the centre of the ongoing debate over the principle of universal jurisdiction – the ability of third-party national courts to adjudicate criminal cases that involve communities outside their territories. This article suggests that we can find the key for understanding the community basis of criminal law in the neighbouring field of libel law. At its centre stands the libel trial of Emile Habibi against the editors of Al-Sinara that took place in 1988–90. Libel law provides an interesting arena for exploring the community component of criminal law, as it takes its guidelines for recognizing defamation from an ‘imagined community.’ Habibi, an Arab citizen of Israel, a writer, and a political leader, was accused by the editors of Al-Sinara of having collaborated with the Zionist forces during the war of 1...

Current coronary intervention controversy: who's to judge?

Dear Editor, The alleged overutilization of coronary interventional procedures by a cardiologist at St. Joseph Medical Center in Maryland has received significant press coverage. The issues of appropriate use and patient safety have led to multiple lawsuits on behalf of patients and the issue of defamation of character has resulted in countersuits. The possibility of conflict of interest involving the physician and a coronary device manufacturer has been highlighted. The hospital has informed and apologized to patients, has resolved regulatory concerns, and has thoroughly restructured its peer review process in the catheterization laboratory. (Published: 17 October 2011) Citation: Journal of Community Hospital Internal Medicine Perspectives 2011, 1 : 7201 - DOI: 10.3402/jchimp.v1i3.7201

The War of Wells’s Lives

H.G. Wells has often been unlucky in his biographers. He told the story of his own life in Experiment in Autobiography (1934), a two-volume work filled with vivid recollections and fascinating detail but weighed down at last by its author’s dedication to “The Idea of a Planned World,” which leads him to assert that his progression “from a backyard to Cosmopolis” has made him “the conscious Common Man of his time and culture” (417-18, 643). Here was a bubble waiting to be pricked, especially as the autobiography was supplemented by an episodic, unpublished “Postscript” containing suppressed details of his tangled love-life. The “Postscript” would make its first appearance fifty years later under the title (chosen by his son, G.P. Wells) H.G. Wells in Love, but by that time its contents had been heavily trailed in biographies stepping delicately around the British libel laws. (Though Wells was dead, most of his lovers were still alive and some, notably Rebecca West and Martha Gellhorn, were highly litigious.) From Vincent Brome’s H.G. Wells (1951) to Gordon N. Ray’s H.G. Wells and Rebecca West (1974), an air of scandal-mongering surrounded Wellsian biography, and to some extent this still remains. Andrea Lynn’s Shadow Lovers (2001) contained new revelations, particularly about Martha Gellhorn, and David Lodge's biographical novel A Man of Parts (2011) revisits Wells's earlier love affairs at great length. Lodge, however, seems to have been unaware of Wells’s unpublished correspondence with Amber Reeves (the mother of his daughter Anna-Jane), which is drawn on in Michael Sherborne’s biography. In his foreword to Another Kind of Life, sf novelist Christopher Priest calls Wells “a great writer” who “left us dozens of great works.” Moreover, he was “an interesting man, a decent man, and an honest one” (11). This verdict is strikingly different from that given by several of Wells’s earlier biographers, even though they were prepared to admit somewhat grudgingly that he was a great writer, at least of science fiction. Lovat Dickson in H.G. Wells: His Turbulent Life and Times (1969) and Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie in The Time Traveller: The Life of H.G. Wells (1973) found him both indecent and personally dishonest. The Mackenzies in a 1987 epilogue to The Time Traveller wrote of “the personal irresponsibility which so vitiated every aspect of H.G.’s life” (458), while Dickson found in that life “the almost complete absence of any moral values” (315). Still more outspoken was Michael Coren, whose The Invisible Man: The Life and Liberties of H.G. Wells (1993) added political debunking to slanderous personal assessment. Coren’s declared aim was to demonstrate that “Wells’s influence on his own age, and his influence on [the] ages to come, were, taken as a whole, pernicious and destructive” (11). At least

Reframing Libel: Taking (All) Rights Seriously and Where It Leads

In preparing this paper, we have returned to first principles and re-evaluated fundamental aspects of libel law, its purposes, its substance, and its processes. Our thinking has been informed by, first, philosophical understandings of democracy and the public sphere and in particular the role of freedom of speech and of the media therein, and secondly, the social psychology of reputation and privacy. By doing so, we are able to ground some of the proposals for reform made previously by Index on Censorship, English PEN, Lord Lester, and others. We do so, however, not through the prism of an over-weaned emphasis on freedom of expression, but rather by triangulating the rights and interests of claimants, defendants, and the wider public. Ultimately, we recommend a coherent set of significant substantive and procedural reforms that if enacted would enhance access to justice and reduce costs for all but the most serious and/or most damaging libels. This involves the recommendation of the introduction of a two-track libel regime.