Defamation and American Democracy

Hear from Professor RonNell Andersen Jones of the University of Utah, United States on the successes and limitations of defamation law in addressing harmful falsehoods and conspiracy theories.

Please join the Centre for Law and Social Justice and the Centre for Business Law and Practice for a guest seminar by Professor RonNell Andersen Jones on the complex crossroads that defamation laws are at in American politics. This seminar will highlight how defamation laws have become a key tool in US political discourse for correcting damaging lies about elections and officials, but have also risked being misused to suppress free speech. 

Abstract

Defamation law and American political discourse are at a historically complicated intersection. Despite extraordinarily high constitutional hurdles, US libel law has become the go-to tool for plaintiffs aiming to correct widespread, damaging lies about elections and elected officials. Indeed, on some key issues, defamation litigation has been the only meaningful tool for ascertaining and announcing a societally important truth. But as we look to defamation law to meet this new moment, we must also be sensitive to the ways in which it fails as an instrument for battling harmful conspiracy theories – and, worse yet, the ways in which its rapid rise in popularity may be emboldening those who wish to weaponize the law to stifle freedom of speech and press. This seminar explores how, even as we celebrate defamation law’s successes against some of America’s most democracy-harming falsehoods, we must also appreciate its deficits. The US experience teaches that libel law cannot, by itself, build a communications ecosystem rooted in provable, shared fact.

About the Speaker

Professor RonNell Andersen Jones is a University Distinguished Professor and Teitelbaum Chair in Law at the University of Utah and an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. A former newspaper reporter and editor, Professor Andersen Jones is a First Amendment scholar who teaches, researches, and writes on legal issues affecting the press and on the intersection between the media and the courts. She is one of the foremost scholars on American press freedom, with work that addresses the role of journalism as a check on government and the constitutional and statutory rights of newsgatherers. She is a widely cited national expert on media defamation suits. Professor Andersen Jones’s scholarship has appeared in numerous books and journals, including Northwestern Law Review, Michigan Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Washington University Law Review, and the Harvard Law Review Forum, and she is co-editor of The Future of Press Freedom: Democracy, Law, and the News in Changing Times, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. She is a frequent commentator on media-law matters for MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal. During the 2023-24 academic year, Professor Andersen Jones was a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. During Trinity Term 2025, she will be a research visitor at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at Oxford University.

How To Attend 

Please register in advance via TicketTailor.