Jo Glanville writes passionately in today’s Guardian about what Lord Hoffman called “the blackmailing effect” of our libel laws. She bemoans the no win, no fee regime and laments the fact that, according to a recent study by the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford University, the cost of libel litigation in England and Wales is 140 times the average elsewhere in Europe. As she puts it, the present system has turned “the libel courts into casinos”.
Unfortunately, all this has been said since time immemorial. Indeed, so hackneyed do the arguments over libel appear to be – on both sides – that Blade sometimes wonders whether this grandiose bickering has assumed the form of a curious English ritual. Talking of which, when confronted with the barrage of cliche that libel, like no other area of law, seems destined to provoke, Blade wishes he could travel in a time machine to a society which settled its disputes by means of a good old-fashioned duel. After all, it was good enough for Joseph Conrad, so why not?
But despite his weariness when it comes to hearing the same tired old phrases trotted out (next up: “London is the libel capital of the world”), Blade is, at the end of the day, an Article 10 man. As such, he too is in mournful mood. The cause is a conversation he had with his literary agent recently. She told Blade that it was becoming more and more difficult to place “tricky” manuscripts, i.e., those with some degree of legal risk. “Publishers don’t want to touch them,” she said. “They get scared off by the prospect of fighting a huge legal battle.” She even said that, as an agent, she was increasingly familiar with the libel lawyers’ letter before action. “If I get a lawyer’s letter, that’s usually it,” she confessed. “The MS is returned to the author.”
But libel isn’t all bad. It exists for a purpose. It is blatantly wrong for a newspaper such as the Express to publish a series of falsehoods about Kate and Gerry McCann, and it is right that those so vilified have a means of redress. But maybe – just maybe – it’s time for the claimant libel lawyers to highlight the good they do, rather than stand on the back foot and simply rebut the many attacks made on them. In other words, the ancient tort of libel might just need bit of trendy 21st century PR.
Pictured: a dragonfly of the family Libellulidae found throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. With thanks to Martin Werker.
