Tim Writes:
>> That would imply that only criminal and not civil action could be
>> employed when someone is injured or made less wealthy by the actions of
>> another, in the absence of contract, consideration, or concrete
>> property right.
> Many actions make others less wealthy. When a Borders bookstore opens
> in town and business suffers dramatically at the smaller bookstores,
> their owners have certainly been made "less wealthy." (I'm not
> against Borders in any way, but compelling statistical evidence, and
> even direct causal/eyewitness evidence can be found.)
> Ditto for price wars. Ditto for when a company switches from buying
> from Alice to buying from Bob and Alice goes bankrupt.
Yes, yes, certainly there are injuries and reductions in wealth which
should not form the basis for lawsuits. That does not serve as a proof
that civil action should never be permitted, except as part of an existing
or implied contract between the parties, or some damage to actual
property.
[snip]
>> We need to replace silly laws with torts, not the other way around.
> Competition is not a tort. Economic losses are not torts--unless the
> economic loss came about through some kind of physical trespass,
> arson, and related acts of actual aggression.
Would "There's cyanide in the Tylenol" count?
How about "There's a pedophile in the daycare center?"
>> If Alice puts up a sign on her house that says "Danger to Children Next
>> Door" because John reads Playboy, and Alice thinks Playboy exploits
>> Womyn and Children because she's a Dworkinista, I think John has every
>> right to sue the bitch when he gets fired as a Disney VP, and the
>> sexually frustrated Oprah fans on his block start telling everyone that
>> he's a NAMBLA member.
> Well, your views are counter to everything I believe. I can't speak
> for others here, so I won't. But in my view, the above is a crystal
> clear case of free speech in the First sense, and an equally clear
> case of where the proper remedy for John is _his own speech_.
There are practical cases where the classic notion that the remedy to bad
speech is more speech simply doesn't work.
An oft-cited example is a parent falsely accused of sex crimes against
their children by CPS.
This creates the situation where the victim is placed in the position of
reiterating the libel in order to state his side of the story, which is
often worse than not saying anything, particularly to people who haven't
been poisoned by the original tale.
If John puts up his own sign saying "I'm not a danger to children", now we
have two signs, and probably twice as many people seeing at least one of
them, who were prior to seeing them, blissfully unaware that John's
alleged perversion was a subject of community debate.
A story in the local paper with the headline "Local Man Denies Being
a Danger to Children" isn't going to help John either.
John is helped only by a reduction in the number of people tainted. Not
by unlimited airtime to say - "I'm John, and the allegations of
baby-sodomy are completely untrue."
The notion that some libel is so bad, that it is not capable of being
remedied at all by an opposing point of view being presented, used to be a
well-understood concept in the courts of this country. In the 1950's, for
example, the standard for libel cases was that the person claiming libel
had to prove what was said untrue. Only three things were so revolting,
according to the moral standards of the time, that the burden of proof was
reversed, and damages were automatically awarded unless the libeler was
able to prive them true.
They were calling someone a Communist, a homosexual, or saying they had a
venereal disease.
Indeed, we can remember from the McCarthy era, that being smeared as a
Communist was not remedied by even an unlimited amount of counter-speech
by the person so labeled.
Today, we don't care much if people are homosexuals, Communists, or have
STDs.
The new unremediable libels are child pornography, NAMBLA-supporting, and
adults having sex with young kids, and suggestions that someone believes
that an individual might support such things, based on their comments
about other things.
>> If someone points out that Tim May has 6000 lbs of Ammonium Nitrate and
>> Fuel Oil in his garage, owns a veritable arsenal of guns, and wishes to
>> water his lawn with the blood of Treasury Agents, some might suggest
>> this is a free society at work as well.
>> Of course, Tim might not see the humor when the tanks roll up. :)
> It's already happened, and I didn't try to sue the person who made
> the (very similar) claim.
Suppose the claim resulted in a raid, and Lon Horiuchi shot your wife.
--
Eric Michael Cordian 0+
O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division
"Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"
