Free Republic

On Thursday afternoon, Judge Irving of the DC Superior Court ordered vexatious litigant Michael E. Mann to pay Mark's co-defendants Competitive Enterprise Institute and Rand Simberg $477,350.80 in attorney's fees - within thirty days. This is related to counts that were dismissed on Anti-SLAPP grounds half-way through the case - one was against CEI for republishing a National Review editorial critical of Mann deemed protected speech and the other against CEI and Rand for "intentional infliction of emotional distress". According to anti-slapp.org: SLAPPs are Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. These damaging suits chill free speech and healthy debate by targeting...

PHOENIX (CN) — Donald Trump allies including Rudy Giuliani and Arizona Republican leaders argued Monday that an indictment accusing them of conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election should be dismissed under Arizona’s newly amended anti-SLAPP statute, barring prosecutions intended to inhibit free exercise of First Amendment rights. Fourteen of the 16 remaining defendants in Arizona’s “fake electors” case told a Maricopa County judge that the signing and certification of a document assigning Arizona’s 11 electoral votes to Donald Trump rather than President Joe Biden in 2020 was an expression of the defendants’ First Amendment freedoms to petition the government....

This column originally appeared in the January 27th print edition of National Review: America is a land of acronyms, and, useful as they are, acronyms can quickly curdle into jargon. SLAPP stands for "strategic lawsuit against public participation" — i.e., using legal action to cow an opponent into silence, and withdrawal from the public square. It was coined in the Eighties by Penelope Canan and George W. Pring at the University of Denver, and in the Nineties they turned it into a book: SLAPPs: Getting Sued for Speaking Out. And it proved so influential that by the Oughts various jurisdictions...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - A state appeals court issued a favorable ruling Tuesday for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in a lawsuit over a lavish 2000 Hollywood fundraising gala. A three-judge panel of the 2nd Appellate District ordered a Superior Court judge to reconsider the senator's motion to remove her from the lawsuit filed by businessman Peter F. Paul, who bankrolled the event. Paul alleged in a February 2004 lawsuit that Clinton; her husband, former President Bill Clinton; her former national finance director, David Rosen, and others fraudulently induced him to underwrite and executive produce the star-studded gala that attracted celebrities...