The Economist newspaper runs this story about how a conflict between US and British libel laws is working its way through the US courts. The case, involving a British court’s determination that an American author libeled a Saudi, has been heard in lower US courts. The author, Rachel Ehrenfeld, has not been successful so far, so the case is now being appealed. The article notes how US and British libel law differ, with the UK courts requiring an author to substantiate what s/he has written. The piece notes, too, that for all the commotion about ‘free speech’, the case being heard is actually about jurisdiction, about whether judgments of foreign courts are applicable in the US.

The article is worth reading. The link below may not be accessible to non-subscribers. If that’s the case, then you’ll have to find a hard copy of the paper. Or subscribe, of course….

Sheikh it all about
How far can a Saudi sheikh use English law against an American author?

CAN the guarantee of free speech in America’s first amendment trump English libel law? That is the question facing New York’s Court of Appeals, in a case starting on November 15th. Rachel Ehrenfeld, a New York-based author, is seeking a ruling that an English libel judgment against her cannot be enforced in America and that her book, “Funding Evil”, is constitutionally protected free speech.

Ms Ehrenfeld’s book makes a series of allegations about the charitable activities of a wealthy Saudi businessman, Khalid Mahfouz, all of which he strenuously denies. Mr Mahfouz has won numerous victories in English courts against those who have sought to link him to Islamist terrorism. In August, for example, Britain’s Cambridge University Press withdrew all copies of “Alms for Jihad”, a book taking a similar line to Ms Ehrenfeld. That caused a furore: American librarians have refused the publishers’ request to withdraw the book from their shelves; surviving copies change hands for hundreds of dollars on the internet.

“Funding Evil”, by contrast, was never published in Britain; indeed it sold only a few dozen copies there, via internet booksellers. Ms Ehrenfeld and her publishers were not represented in the court hearing in London in 2005. “English law does not apply here since 1776, when we won our independence,” she says. That did not impress the judge, Mr Justice Eady, who awarded £10,000 ($21,000) damages—the maximum possible in a summary hearing of an undefended action—to Mr Mahfouz and to two co-plaintiffs. He also declared her allegations against Mr Mahfouz false, and criticised her for using the English court proceedings to advertise her book, citing its intentionally eye-catching new subtitle: “The book that the Saudis don’t want you to read.”
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