When I was in law school, in the before times, libel and defamation were treated as a holdover from British common law. We learned how they had been winnowed down in the long “arc of justice,” starting with the Zenger trial in 1735. This trend of weakening libel and defamation laws, and any constraints on speech, was treated as uniformly positive.

Weakening... but not down to nothing. It's a lot harder to be found guilty of libel in the US than in the UK, and that's a good thing. You still can be, though, and that is also a good thing.

("Guilty" may be the wrong word, because it's not a criminal offense, but I'm not sure what the right one is here.)

> ("Guilty" may be the wrong word, because it's not a criminal offense, but I'm not sure what the right one is here.)

Defamation is a crime in many jurisdictions, including the US (not federally, but in over 20 states). Prosecutions and convictions are rare-but not non-existent. At least in the US, punishments are light (Wikipedia cites a study saying that the average custodial sentence for criminal libel in the US is just under six months). In free countries, prosecutions are generally reserved for particularly egregious cases (e.g. suppose A does some trivial thing to offend B, so as payback B plasters posters all over town accusing A of sex crimes, with the allegation being completely invented). Given this, the vast majority of defamation cases are civil not criminal.

Do folks going through law school grok how proliferation of libelous and defamatory statements happens now, without friction and at the speed of light? And the outsized impact it can have as compared to times ago? I posit that libel and defamation should be even weightier issues than when British common law was around. I'm encouraged to see the turnout of Alex Jones ordeal and am anxiously waiting to see how Dominion vs Fox news turns out. I am hoping that the aftermath of all this is that journalists/people-pretending-to-be-journalists/anyone-with-a-sizable-platform will be more careful about their reporting and statements. Of course this is all a murky area because many times it's hard to decide what is true and even harder to decide who gets to do the deciding, but for getting the obvious things wrong and when signs of bad faith are clearly there the hammer should get dropped more often, I think such an environment would reduce chaos and extremism that we see more and more of.