Re:Hotel guest in Thailand jailed for defamation after posti...
by AmericanChopper on Sunday September 27, 2020 @07:17PM
(#24611030)
The UK and USA both have common law systems, where judges have the freedom to establish precedence in regards to matters of law. I believe most of continental Europe operates on civil law systems where judges have much less room for interpretation.
On the matter of defamation the US is quite different from everywhere else though, because of the 1st amendment, and the 'actual malice' standards applied to 'public figures' in defamation cases. The confounding factors in the EU are the privacy clauses in the European Convention on Human Rights, so you see cases that would be related to defamation elsewhere being litigated on privacy in the EU.
Re:Hotel guest in Thailand jailed for defamation after posti...
by 082349872349872 on Monday September 28, 2020 @02:17AM
(#24613502)
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There are two clearly distinct legal traditions: the common law in the anglo countries and civil law in the rest. Also USA and UK seem to have very different and each of them unique treatment in this matter.
So it's not a question of first world countries vs the rest. It's more of a USA vs UK vs the rest of democratic countries, not sure where other Commonwealth countries fall.
Edit: I feel I wasn't clear. Civil law countries mostly adhere to ancient legal doctrine, some coming from Roman Empire, some from middle ages tradition, some from Bonaparte, some from German theoreticians. This corpus is pretty consistent, grown through statutes, while common law tend to develop idiosyncratic variants following practice in every country.