Libel Terrorism Protection in New York

This is good news, but should be a Federal bill to protect all Americans. [Link]

Via Democracy Project, it’s the perfect companion piece to today’s news in the LA Times about our friends in the Kingdom retaining pride of place as bankrollers of Sunni jihadists worldwide. Old school HA readers will remember libel tourism as Bryan’s beat, starting with this essential background post on how wealthy Wahhabis silence their critics. You don’t have to kill them; suing them in countries with muscular libel laws and weak free speech protections, like Britain, is usually sufficient to suppress their work and intimidate publishers into staying away. The capper came in December, when New York’s highest court ruled that a British libel judgment entered against Rachel Ehrenfeld, an American critic of the Saudis, would be enforceable even on U.S. soil because the court had no jurisdiction over the Saudi libel plaintiff and therefore couldn’t grant an order under the First Amendment protecting Ehrenfeld from the judgment. Which, in effect, meant that Americans no longer had free speech rights even in America, so long as their work ended up overseas and subjected them to suit there.