One
usually thinks of a librarian as a calm and lawsuit-free job. However, a
librarian in Canada is facing a $3.5-million lawsuit over a personal
blog post he wrote three years ago. Dale Askey, an associate librarian
at McMaster University, is being sued by Edwin Mellen Press Ltd., an
international academic publishing company, who filed two lawsuits last
June.
Mellen
Press alleges that Askey accused them of “accepting second class
authors” and urging “university libraries not to buy (their) titles
because they are of poor quality and poor scholarship.” While this
lawsuit will be heard in Canadian court under Canadian law, bloggers
have been threatened with lawsuits in the US for articles they’ve
written and opinions they’ve expressed. This brings up a whole slew of
First Amendment issues and the SLAPP statute.
If
this lawsuit were filed in the United States, it might be considered a
“SLAPP” (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) lawsuit. SLAPP
refers to a lawsuit or legal threat intended to censor, intimidate, and
silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until
they abandon their criticism or opposition. Typically SLAPP lawsuits
target ordinary citizens who cannot afford to pay the hefty legal fees
it takes to defend such a lawsuit. They are a method used to intimate
others from participating in debate and free speech and can be a strong
method of silencing critics. SLAPP lawsuits often come in the form of a
lawsuit claiming defamation or libel. The defining characteristic of a
SLAPP lawsuit is that the plaintiff usually loses the case. However, a
typical SLAPP lawsuit does not get to the trial phase as it is method
used to chill the speech of citizens.
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