Researchers involved in research misconduct proceedings are increasingly threatening or bringing legal defamation claims against the institutions, complainants, and publications involved in the proceedings. Although defamation claims do not often succeed, they can nevertheless be costly and lengthy. This article analyzes certain defamation cases in the research misconduct space and provides advice for institutions and other involved parties seeking to minimize potential defamation liability associated with research misconduct proceedings.

Defamation law is a long-standing research focus. Previous studies on defamation law have pointed out the importance of balancing two fundamental issues in law, namely, protection of reputation and freedom of speech. The present corpus-based legal study, using ConcGram 1.0 as the analytical tool, examined the phraseological profile of reported cases on defamation in Hong Kong in order to find out the types of defense and the approach to meaning in the defamation case law in Hong (...) Kong. Regarding defenses to a defamation claim, the results show that fair comment, qualified privilege, and justification are the most prevalent types, that unintentional defamation is not used at all, and that there has been a noticeable shift from fair comment to honest comment. As for the approach to meaning, the ordinary and natural approach is found to be a pivotal means of solving the threshold problem in defamation cases, that is, whether the words involved are defamatory or not. (shrink)

Until the late 18th century, defamation was often treated as an action able wrong even when the defamer’s claims were undeniably true (indeed, sometimes especially when true, as reflected in the slogan, “the greater the truth, the greater the libel”). In the following centuries, however, truth be came a complete defense to defamation lawsuits. Even outside the law, fal sity became an essential element of the common understanding of “defa mation,” to the point that today most English dictionaries (...) and many extra legal discussions of the defamatory treat it as necessarily untrue. Here I challenge the new understanding of the wrong of defamation that took flight under the law’s wing, arguing that it is unduly narrow. Accurate def amation is a serious wrong and current understandings—and tort practice, in particular—harmfully hide this fact. Privacy law, moreover, does not provide adequate redress for it either, for reasons I set out. (shrink)

Defamation is the act of damaging another’s reputation. According to recent legal research, defamation laws may be improperly used in many ways. Some of these uses profoundly affect the historian’s work: first, when defamation laws protect reputations of states or nations as such; second, when they prevent legitimate criticism of officials; and, third, when they protect the reputations of deceased persons. The present essay offers two tests of these three abuses in legal cases where historians were defendants. (...) The first test, a short worldwide survey, confirms the occurrence of all three abuses; the second test from nine western European countries) the occurrence of the third abuse. Both tests touch on problems central to the historical profession: living versus deceased persons; facts versus opinions; legal versus historical truth; the relationship between human dignity, reputation, and privacy; the role of politicians, veterans, and Holocaust deniers as complainants; the problem of amnestied crimes. The second test—the results of which are based on verdicts, commentaries, and press articles, and presented in a synoptic table—looks closely into the complainants’ and defendants’ profiles, the allegedly defamatory statements themselves, and the verdicts. All statements deemed defamatory were about such contemporary events as World War II and colonial wars. Both tests amount to two conclusions. The first one is about historians’ professional rights and obligations: historians should make true, but privacy-sensitive or potentially offending, statements only when the public interest is served; otherwise, they should have a right to silence. The second conclusion concerns defamation itself: defamation cases and threats to sue in defamation have a chilling effect on the historical debate; they are often but barely veiled attempts at censorship. (shrink)

This Article addresses the question of what limits, if any, freedom of speech would place on holding authors liable for the reputational damage they cause with fiction. By “freedom of speech” I am not referring to the First Amendment but rather to one conception of the moral idea underlying it. According to this conception, the limits that freedom of speech places on the scope of authors’ liability for causing false and defamatory beliefs are whatever limits are necessary to adequately protect (...) our interests as potential authors and audiences, and whose costs are acceptable in terms of other interests. To apply this conception, it will be necessary to identify our interests as potential authors of and audiences for fiction about real people, and to assess how these interests would be affected by different limits. Ultimately, I will argue that freedom of speech is consistent with holding authors liable for reputational damage caused by their violations of fiction’s “veracity rules” and for reputational damage caused by mistakes that their target audience would be expected to make. But liability for beliefs that are traceable to mistakes that only an author’s incidental audience would be expected to make is, I will argue, prohibitedby freedom of speech, so long as the costs of that protection remain acceptable. (shrink)

In Chapters 5 and 6, he presents a strong critique not only of the egregrious Rolf Hochhuth, whose play The Deputy was the origin of this defamation, but covers several modern critics, leaving his strongest words for the anti-Catholic Catholics that blossom wherever microphones can be found. He closes by tying this calumny to the real "culprit" (from the point of view of the critiques), the Catholic Church as the bulwark against the Culture of Death."--BOOK JACKET.

Being on a 40 city 24x7 book tour for War Against the Weak . I am writing this from an airplane, and I regret my brevity. Catching up on some email from a few weeks back I have now come across your remarks and those of your like minded friends defending Spencer.

Although the reputation of Englands first queen regnant, Mary Tudor had remained substantially unchanged in the intervening centuries, there were always some defenders of that Catholic queen among the historians of Victorian England. It is worth noting, however, that such revisionism made little if any impact on the schoolroom history textbooks, where Marys reputation remained much as John Foxe had defined it. Such anxiety as there was about attempts to restore something of Marys reputation were made more problematic by the (...) increasing number and increasingly visible presence of a comprehensive Catholic hierarchy in the nineteenth century, and by high-profile converts to the Catholic faith and papal authority. The pre-eminent historians of the later Victorian era consistently remained more favourable to the reign of Elizabeth, seen as the destroyer,of an effective Catholic church in England. (shrink)

In the paper, the author deals with the history of attempts to defame integrative bioethics by a group of Croatian philosophers and incidental media appearances in which the tendency was to slander the long-standing research concept of the Zagreb bioethics school. In the introduction, a historical overview of the basic qualitative and quantitative results of integrative bioethics in the Croatian and European context is given. This is followed by an analysis of the context of defamation of integrative bioethics and (...) the actors of defamation, separated according to “scientific” and media content. Finally, the attempt to compromise and profane integrative bioethics is interpreted as part of the destrolution phenomenon, the theory of post-communist chaos and the production of fake envy. (shrink)

The current UN policy regarding free speech presents a philosophical dilemma between accepting the free speech provisions in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and exceptions carved out for hatred, hostility, and religious defamation. The Declaration should be understood to imply viewpoint neutrality and the exceptions for defamation are not viewpoint neutral. If the UN were to adopt J. S. Mill’s crucial distinctions between expression and performative speech, content and context, and mental states and the acts motivated by (...) them, it would be clear that hatred, hostility, and defamation cannot be exceptions to viewpoint neutral free speech. If the heart of free speech is freedom especially for the thought we hate, then the UN should abandon its exceptions or abandon appeals to free speech. However, I will offer a strong reason that it should not do the latter. (shrink)

The present article concerns itself with the relationship between defamation and negligence in the protection of the interest in reputation. The.

This paper examines the ‘doctrine of reportage’—a particular application of the Reynolds qualified privilege defence to defamation recognized by.

This article presents a study of court judgments involving women who, in connection with #MeToo, identified alleged perpetrators of sexual violence in social media and were later prosecuted for and convicted of criminal defamation in Sweden. We conceptualise the use of social media to share experiences of sexual violence as an informal path to justice. First, we show that this is supported by how court judgments describe women’s reasons for sharing their information, such as telling their story and sharing (...) it with others. Second, according to Swedish defamation law, a truth defence is allowed only if the defamatory statement is first considered to be justifiable, balancing between the defendant’s interest of freedom of speech and the complainant’s interest of honour and reputation. We show that the courts did not assign the interest of speaking out about sexual violence such a significance that it would make the statement justifiable. In effect, the criminal justice system emerges as the only path to justice for victims of sexual violence, simultaneously making perpetrators invisible and victims responsible for telling without naming. (shrink)

This chapter examines the vice of defamation or spreading negative gossip for its entertainment value. Kant worries about the effects of gossip on us, on others, and on the moral community. When the love of gossip becomes a deep-seated enjoyment of spreading nasty rumors about other people, he sees it as a full-fledged vice, one he calls the vice of defamation. As Kant describes the information-sharing that characterizes the vice of defamation, it is information that casts another (...) person in a negative light. The duty to avoid the vice of defamation is the duty "not to take malicious pleasure in exposing the faults of others so that one will be thought as good as, or at least not worse than, others." Thus, the malicious pleasure is the real problem; self-conceit is a major impediment to having a good will. (shrink)

Several defamation lawsuits have been filed by alleged perpetrators against victims who have spoken out about their experiences of sexual violence both ahead of and amid the #MeToo Movement. This article situates those suits within the connected frameworks of SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against public participation) and DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender). While SLAPPs have historically been used to silence public discourse on issues of public concern, DARVO rhetorical tactics serve to reassert and reinscribe traditional, harmful power dynamics. (...) This article demonstrates, through an analysis of 72 defamation suits filed between 2014 and 2023, that DARVO language has not only become an integral part of SLAPP suits, but that the DARVO tactics present in SLAPP suits have evolved over time, revealing the influence of high-profile cases covered extensively in the media on lesser-known cases. (shrink)

Sitting at the nexus of unchanging constitutional rights, constantly evolving social norms, and tensions between federal and state justice systems, defamation law in the US is exceedingly complex. In this work, I focus on a single conceptual and practical problem amidst this network: the fact-opinion distinction. This distinction—developed largely as a result of US Supreme Court decisions _Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc._ and _Milkovich v. Lorraine Journal Co._—states that, while opinions are protected under the First Amendment so long as (...) they do not imply “provably false” information, facts, if false, may always be actionable in a lawsuit for defamation. Thus, the judicial decision of whether an allegedly defamatory statement is fact or opinion is influential in determining whether a claim may move forward. In spite of the significance of this distinction, legal precedent and academic literature shows that there are no generally agreed upon characteristics to organize statements into these two categories. Using the framework of Appraisal Analysis (Martin and White, The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English, Palgrave Macmillan, London 2005), I examine a corpus of previously adjudicated defamatory language to answer the question: _how does expression of stance differ between judicially-determined statements of opinion and fact in defamation cases?_ This analysis reveals that judicially-determined opinions express more markers of attitude and expanding engagement than their factual counterparts. Ultimately, I argue that this research may be directly applied to the analysis of allegedly defamatory language in the US, and, in being so applied, may play a role in adding robustness to existing analytical procedures regarding the distinction between fact and opinion in defamation law in the US. (shrink)

The interpretation and the indirect reporting of a speaker’s communicative intentions lie at the crossroad between pragmatics, argumentation theory, and forensic linguistics. Since the leading case Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc., in the United States the legal problem of determining the truth of a quotation is essentially equated with the correctness of its indirect reporting, i.e. the representation of the speaker’s intentions. For this reason, indirect reports are treated as interpretations of what the speaker intends to communicate. Theoretical considerations, (...) aimed at establishing the pragmatic meaning of an utterance and differentiating between presumptive and non-presumptive interpretation, are thus interwoven with the practical legal need of distinguishing a correct indirect report from an indirect one or a misquotation. An incorrect report or a misquotation has the dialectical effect of attributing to the misquoted party commitments that he never held, which the latter needs to rebut. This shifting of the burden of persuasion can be increased by using strategically the conflict between the presumptive interpretation of an utterance and the non-presumptive one, i.e. the different types of pragmatic ambiguity. When an interpreter is confronted with an utterance taken out of its dialogical context, his interpretative process is not guided by the actual context or intention, but rather the most frequent or prototypical dialogical setting or the most typical individual purpose that it could have served to achieve. This presumptive reconstruction can be used to provide a prima facie case that the other party needs to reject. The stronger the interpretative presumptions a speaker needs to rebut, the more effective the misquotation strategy. The conflict between the systematic and the presumptive process of interpretation can be represented as an argumentative mechanism of reconstruction of the individual intention, which allows one to assess the reasonableness of the interpretative reasoning. (shrink)

The analysis of courtroom trials has attracted considerable scholarly attention. However, studies performing SFL analysis of legal texts and speeches are rare. The up-to-date published studies handled criminal cases; yet, there is a lack of SFL studies examining civil cases like divorce and defamation. The present qualitative study utilized systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA) of the 2022 defamation trial sued by Johnny Depp’s lawyer (the plaintiff) against Amber Heard (the defendant). The SF-MDA of the transitivity system aimed (...) to examine and compare the experiential meaning in the speeches of the plaintiff and the defendant. The study aimed to answer the following research questions: (1) what are the differences in the plaintiff’s and defendant’s use of experiential meanings? (2) how can transitivity and multimodality aid in the experiential communicative meanings and the arrival of the final verdict in the courtroom? and (3) what were the language tactics that were manifested throughout the analysis? The plaintiff utilized material processes with the highest frequency, followed by relational and mental processes. However, the defendant made excessive use of the relational processes followed by mental and material processes. The speech of the plaintiff included more circumstances than the defendant. Some of the language techniques, used by the plaintiff and the defendant were detected. (shrink)

In pragma-dialectics, a study of legal reasoning analyses judicial judgements’ dialectical and rhetorical aspects. Most analytical studies of legal reasoning focus on the role of judges and their decision-making mechanisms. In our study, we focus on the strategic manoeuvring of the opposing parties. Depending on the context, parties may have to justify their decision to litigants, a professional audience, and the public in rhetorically and dialectically different ways. What makes strategic manoeuvring special in judicial trials is that rhetorical aims (winning (...) the debate) and dialectical aims (convincing the jury), in contrast with debates where parties dialectically aim at resolving a dispute by reaching consensus, are not in conflict. We analyse the Depp ctr. Heard trial 2022, focusing on the parties’ dialectical potential in cases when rhetorical aspects play an important role in addition to objective evidence required by the legal framework. Depp’s party started the trial with a strategic movement we shall call as a ‘topical shift’, doubling their starting position, aiming at dual dialectical goals, and hence also beginning a new debate parallel with the apparently only one by introducing a not directly relevant factor into the debate. Although other factors also played a role in Depp’s victory, setting up his position in the confrontation stage this way was decisive for the trial’s outcome: Heard’s party, following a traditional route, joined actively in one of the dual debates only, effectively giving up the extra debate started by Depp. This way, analysing the trial offers wider consequences to how to understand strategic manoeuvring in judicial trials, and in general as well. (shrink)

The defence of qualified privilege emerged in the 1760s in cases involving domestic servants suing their masters for bad references. Its function was to reverse the burden of proof of malice—transferring it from the defendant to the plaintiff—and it was based on the ‘occasion’ of speaking. The evidence suggests that this meant ‘cause’, but later cases interpreted it as meaning ‘situation’ and appeared to hold that there must be a duty or interest in both the publisher and publishee in order (...) for the defence to be raised. This interpretation proved controversial because it denied a defence when the defendant mistakenly believed that he had a duty or interest. In the 1890s it was finally settled that a duty or interest in both publisher and publishee was an essential requirement of the defence; perhaps this was due to parallel developments relating to similar concepts in the torts of deceit and negligence. (shrink)

It is widely presumed that privacy is ‘factive’, i.e. that it cannot be diminished by accessing or disseminating falsehoods. But if this is so, what wrongs are committed in cases where others access documents of ours (letters, medical records, etc.) which contain false information? In this article, I examine various ways of explaining the wrongfulness of accessing and dissemination falsehoods (defamation; that privacy can be violated without being diminished; ‘control’ accounts of privacy; downstream revelations of truths; that falsehoods diminish (...) ‘propositional’ or ‘attentional’ privacy). I lay out what each of these accounts misses about accessing falsehoods, about privacy, and/or about the right to privacy. I then propose two alternative ways of accounting for the intuitive wrongfulness of accessing and disseminating falsehoods: viewing them as merely ‘attempted’ privacy violations and weakening the truth condition of privacy diminishments. (shrink)

Knowledge of sins of speech derives from knowledge of God and from knowledge of created nature as teleological, rational, social and communicative. Speech is directed to God and neighbours; it is causal and irrevocable; good speech demonstrates integrity, good intent, justice and moderation. Sinful speech arises from wicked intention and damages both speaker and hearer. Blasphemy opposes vocal confession of God with disparagement of his excellence. Defamation opposes justice by speaking against the neighbour’s good reputation. In the Christian community, (...) the speech of regenerate creatures is under repair, as thanksgiving to God and edification of neighbours are established by the moving power of the Holy Spirit. (shrink)

Is it permissible for the state to censor or suppress conspiracy theories, even within liberal democracies? According to a number of political and legal theorists, it is. In this paper, I will argue that the state may sometimes censor conspiracy theories, but it should be permitted to do so only after very strict conditions have been met. I shall first offer some brief thoughts about the definition of ‘conspiracy theory’. I will then critique one existing attempt to address this issue (...) – namely Cíbik and Hardoš’s public reason approach. Next, I shall outline my own proposal. I will argue that we should sometimes consider conspiracy theorising to be a form of discriminatory speech against vulnerable individuals and groups, and we can consider it to be a form of defamation in these cases. Consequently, the state may sometimes be permitted to enact civil laws to sanction such theorising. Finally, I will outline some of the conditions that should be met before state censorship can be considered. (shrink)

The French research ecosystem long resisted extending the ethics regulation processes established for biomedical science into the social sciences. This is now changing. This history of resistance is examined, together with the alternatives proposed. These include self-regulation by professional associations. Consideration is also given to the wider legal environment for French social sciences, particularly the laws on defamation and privacy, which also influence the opportunities for research and for the pursuit of grievances by participants. The introduction of ethics regulation, (...) through IRB-style committees in universities and research organizations, reflects isomorphic pressures from the international research community, reinforced by the impact of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) on the application of national privacy law. Nevertheless, outside the specific domain of health-related research, ethics regulation still sits more lightly on French social science than in the anglosphere. (shrink)

This article explores recent developments inthe regulation of Internet speech, inparticular, injurious or defamatory speech andthe impact the attempts at regulation arehaving on the `body' in the sense of theindividual person who speaks through the mediumof the Internet and upon those harmed by thatspeech. The article proceeds in threesections. First, a brief history of the legalattempts to regulate defamatory Internet speechin the United States is presented; a shortcomparative discussion of defamation law in theUK and Australia is included. As discussedbelow, (...) this regulation has altered thetraditional legal paradigm of responsibilityand, as a result, creates potential problems forthe future of unrestricted and even anonymousspeech on the Internet. Second, an ethicalassessment is made of the defamatory speechenvironment in order to determine which actorshave moral responsibility for the harm causedby defamatory speech. This moral assessment iscompared to the developing and anticipatedlegal paradigm to identify possible conformityof moral and legal tenants or to recognize theconflict between morality and law in assigningresponsibility to defamatory actors. Thisassessment then concludes with possiblesuggestions for changes in the legal climategoverning the regulation of defamatory speechon the Internet, as well as prediction of theresult should the legal climate continue todevelop on its present course. This is not tosuggest that all law, or even the law ofdefamation, be structured to reflect thesubjectivity of a moral construct, but since itis the authors position that the legalassignment of liability in online settings ismisaligned, this reflection can serve asbeginning reassessment of that assignment. (shrink)

Background There are legal protections for nurse researchers at public universities who employ community-based participatory research (CBPR) in research about social or health inequities. Dissemination of CBPR research data by researchers or participants may divulge unjust laws and create an imperative for university involvement. Research Question What are United States-based legal dissemination protections for CBPR health equity nurse researchers? Research Design Three case examples employing CBPR are examined: 1) a mixed methods study with participants reporting illegal discrimination in a municipal (...) initiative about capacity building in community-based organizations serving children; 2) a visual methods study exposing potential clean air law violations in environmental justice research; and 3) a study examining workload violations and illegal discrimination among hotel workers. Participants and Research Context The cases involved participants from protected social class backgrounds. The research is described with respect to: background, funding, research purpose, and research team; research participants’ power and legal vulnerability; dissemination of relevant research information balancing vulnerability and power; research dissemination issues; potential legal issues involved; and laws researchers may use. Ethical Considerations IRB approval was obtained for the studies. Using a social justice ethical framework, studies highlight actual or potential legal aspects of data dissemination in the context of gathering data about injustice. Findings Legal protections for research data dissemination, whistleblower protection, research advancement protection, anti-harassment protection, false claims, defamation, and visual data liabilities are described. Conclusion Knowledge of legal research data dissemination protections is an essential competency for nurse researchers invested in uplifting social justice. (shrink)

This paper assesses normative arguments regarding four views about defamatory meaning. The moralised view holds that a statement about a person is defamatory if and only if we ought to think less of that person if the statement is true. The nonmoralised view holds that a statement is defamatory if and only if people in fact think less of the subject on hearing the statement. A third - the dual view - can be split into two versions. The first version (...) holds that a statement is defamatory if and only if it satisfies either the moralised or non-moralised views. The second version holds that statements satisfying either view can be defamatory, but they ought to be considered fundamentally different forms of personal defamation, with different remedies, defences and conditions of liability attached. Both the moralised and non-moralised views are rejected because they fail to acknowledge instrumental and intrinsic reputational value respectively. The first version of the dual view is rejected because it compromises the expressive value of defamation, implausibly suggests that truth should be a general defence and fails to recognise that different objections apply to the moralised and nonmoralised views. The upshot is that we ought to accept the second version of the dual view. (shrink)

Introduction -- Defamation Criteria: Fact or Value? -- The Elusive Distinction between Fact and Opinion -- Defamation and Freedom of Expression -- Conclusion -- 10 Conclusion: A Unifying Prescription -- Introduction -- Socialist Positivism -- Critical Legal Positivism -- Feminist Positivism -- Alternative Dispute Resolution -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index.

The law of defamation seeks to provide remedies for some of the harms in insult, in particular damage to reputation. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan limits those remedies with respect to public figures, and this chapter considers some of the distinctions and principles involved in providing remedies, including the nature of reasonable expectations.

Should defaming the name of God be of concern even for those who do not have faith in Him? With Gregory Reichberg and Farzad Mahootian.

Should defaming the name of God be of concern even for those who do not have faith in Him? With Gregory Reichberg and Farzad Mahootian.

The defamation action between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard exposed a jurisprudential puzzle within adjudication. Although the trial formally resolves disputes through propositional proof—testing statements capable of being true or false—public attention centred on demeanour, affect, and the visual force of photographic exhibits. No logical contradiction appeared sufficient to determine credibility; instead, attention shifted to features of the proceedings that did not themselves take propositional form. This Article argues that the tension, as experienced in practice, reflects an unexamined assumption (...) about how correspondence must be tested. Drawing on Peircean semiotics, it reconceives the common law trial as an institutionalised inquiry into the durability of truth-claims. Propositions articulate representational claims about past events, but because those events are absent, correspondence cannot be verified by inspection. Adversarial procedure instead subjects articulated claims to structured normative testing. Non-propositional elements—such as demeanour, tone, and visual presentation—do not function as independent truth-makers; they bear on whether a proposition can sustain its representational status under disciplined challenge. Reinterpreting doctrines governing visual evidence and hearsay through this durability model, the Article shows that evidentiary law regulates rather than suppresses non-propositional force as part of mediated correspondence. Truth in common law trials thus emerges through the endurance of propositions under adversarial inquiry. (shrink)

The realm of speech protected by the First Amendment is perennially contentious. This contention arises from the mistaken view that speech must either be unregulated or regulated by the state. This overlooks the regulation of speech that comes from common law civil liability. In a liberal society, the desideratum is not free speech, but free and responsible speech. The common law links freedom to responsibility. This chapter demonstrates how, in the absence of the political regulation of speech, common law regulation— (...) class='Hi'>defamation, negligence, misrepresentation, tortious interference, etc.—provides all that is necessary to maintain the proper balance between free and responsible speech. (shrink)

This chapter discusses memes, which are a lot like jokes. It is not the meme that is funny all by itself; it is the meme viewed against the background of a whole series of thematic variations. It is like this with knock-knock jokes too, or lightbulb jokes. Part of what makes the joke funny is the appreciation that it is a variation on a theme. The joke is at once a move inside a genre and a comment on it, and (...) understanding the joke is really a sensitivity to a whole swath of shared life, background assumptions, images, self-images, and so on. This is just the same sort of ironic self-reference that we see everywhere we look in the history of art, in pop music, in pop culture such as television sitcoms, and, now, in novel form, in the internet meme. The chapter then looks at the addition of Pepe the Frog to the Anti-Defamation League's hate symbols list. (shrink)

This article focuses upon defamation law in Australia and its struggles to adjust to the digital landscape, to illustrate the broader challenges involved in the governance and regulation of data associations. In many instances, online publication will be treated by the courts in a similar fashion to traditional forms of publication. What is more contentious is the question of who, if anyone, should bear the responsibility for digital forms of defamatory publication which result not from an individual author’s activity (...) online but rather from algorithmic associations. This article seeks, in part, to analyse this question, by reference to the Australian case law and associated scholarship regarding search engine liability. Reflecting on the tensions involved here offers us a fresh perspective on defamation law through the conceptual lens of data associations. Here the focus of the article shifts to explore some wider questions posed for defamation law by big data. Defamation law may come to play a significant role in emerging frameworks for algorithmic accountability, but these developments also call into question many of its traditional concepts and assumptions. It may be time to think differently about defamation and to consider its interrelationship with privacy, speech and data protection more fully. As a result, I conclude that the courts and policymakers need to engage more deeply and explicitly with the rationale for the protection of reputation and that more thought needs to be given to changing conceptions of reputation in the context of data associations. (shrink)

In many, especially English, defamation cases,the court often speaks of ``the average reader'',``the reasonable reader'' or similar concepts,which does not refer to any flesh-and-bloodreader of the defamatory text, but is a type ofconstruct of what the court thinks would be thenormal reaction of a person to an allegedlydefamatory text. This concept is compared to asimilar phenomenon found in literary theory inthe persona of the implied reader, created bythe (implied) author as having a given set ofvalues which will lead to (...) an appreciativeinterpretation of the literary work. The papercompares the parallel concepts in the twofields. (shrink)

A number of companies including Google and BMW are currently working on the development of autonomous cars. But if fully autonomous cars are going to drive on our roads, it must be decided who is to be held responsible in case of accidents. This involves not only legal questions, but also moral ones. The first question discussed is whether we should try to design the tort liability for car manufacturers in a way that will help along the development and improvement (...) of autonomous vehicles. In particular, Patrick Lin’s concern that any security gain derived from the introduction of autonomous cars would constitute a trade-off in human lives will be addressed. The second question is whether it would be morally permissible to impose liability on the user based on a duty to pay attention to the road and traffic and to intervene when necessary to avoid accidents. Doubts about the moral legitimacy of such a scheme are based on the notion that it is a form of defamation if a person is held to blame for causing the death of another by his inattention if he never had a real chance to intervene. Therefore, the legitimacy of such an approach would depend on the user having an actual chance to do so. The last option discussed in this paper is a system in which a person using an autonomous vehicle has no duty of interfering, but is still held responsible for possible accidents. Two ways of doing so are discussed, but only one is judged morally feasible. (shrink)

Although Kant’s final work in moral philosophy,Die Metaphysik der Sitten, currently attracts much scholarly attention, there is still a lot to explore. This article is an attempt to get to grips with a particular, often neglected passage of theRechtslehre, namely §35. Here Kant defends the view that not only can a person’s good reputation can be tarnished after his death, but also that this constitutes a violation of this dead person’s property. Here I will not be able to fully clarify (...) what Kant means when he holds that persons can be harmed after their death, but I will put Kant’s view in a few perspectives. (shrink)