Holocaust Research Project

...because they blog under the shadow of the United Kingdom's insane libel laws.

Witness this travesty of a ruling on the libel case against Simon Singh by the British Chiropractic Association, as related by Jack of Kent.

I first learned about the UK's exceedingly plaintiff-friendly libel laws when, shortly after I became interested in Holocaust denial, I followed the libel case against Holocaust historian Professor Deborah Lipstadt brought by Holocaust denier David Irving for, well, quite properly calling him a Holocaust denier in one of her books. What makes British libel laws so plaintiff-friendly is that the burden of proof is not on the plaintiff to show that what was written by the defendant is untrue (or written with a "reckless disregard for the truth") and defamatory, but rather on the defendant to demonstrate that what he or she wrote is true. It is true that Professor Lipstadt ultimately won her case, her victory all the more impressive given how plaintiff-friendly British libel law is and how she in essence had to "prove the Holocaust" in court and why what David Irving writes and says about it constitutes Holocaust denial, but it took many months and a couple of million dollars. If her publisher hadn't stuck with her, she'd have probably had to settle. Indeed, that was almost certainly David Irving's expectation when he brought the case--that Professor Lipstadt would settle. She did not and, fortunately, won big. It could have gone the other way if she had had a less skillful legal team.

Since I've become interested in "alternative" medicine, I've seen examples of the similar abuse of the law, in which various "alternative" practitioners tried to use the law to silence bloggers whose opinions they did not like or writers who criticized them. The most famous example that comes to mind was HIV/AIDS denialist and vitamin magnate Matthias Rath going after Ben Goldacre. Again, it's true Goldacre won, but only because his newspaper stuck by him and paid for his legal defense. This time around, the British Chiropractic Association is going after Simon Singh for this passage in an article he wrote:

The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.

In the U.S., it's highly unlikely that a lawyer would even be willing to take this case as anything other than cash on the barrelhead, so slim would be the chance that it would make it even past a preliminary hearing. Yet, over Thursday and Friday, Singh has had his first preliminary hearing and his first loss. Let Jack of Kent explain: