Today the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) finally dropped its disgraceful libel suit against the science writer Simon Singh, because Singh had won a Supreme Court judgment that restored his right to use the most obviously fair defense: that what he said was fair comment by a journalist stating his opinions on a matter of public […]
The England and Wales Court of Appeals delivered its judgment this morning in Simon Singh's appeal of last year's libel verdict against him. This all began on April 19, 2008, when Singh wrote an opinion piece in the Guardian containing these sentences: The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with […]
We've previously covered the British Chiropractic Association's libel suit against Simon Singh, and the successful effort by Nemesysco to force a critical article to be withdrawn from the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law. Both of these cases involved the peculiar situation of English libel law, which (in the opinion of many) makes […]
In the celebrated libel case brought by the British Chiropractic Association against Simon Singh, Singh has won a round in court. Or rather, he's won the right to appeal a previous loss in court.
A couple of days ago, Olivia Judson discussed the effects on science writing of the execrable state of English libel law, with some details of the British Chiropractic Association's libel case against Simon Singh, and a bit about Mattias Rath's case against Ben Goldacre: "Cracking the Spine of Libel", NYT, 9/15/2009. There's an excellent list […]
For people interested in language, linguistically-interesting bits grow on pretty much all of the trees in the forest of communicative interaction. In order to get on with life, we let most of the specimens pass without comment. But the first two segments of this week's Car Talk radio show, which I listened to with half […]
For an update on the British Chiropractic Association's libel suit against Simon Singh, see Ben Goldacre, "We are more possible than you can powerfully imagine", Bad Science, 7/29/2009. After noting the general freedom-of-speech issue, and the specific public interest in open debate about medical claims, Ben adds: But beyond whether it is right, there is […]
If you're in a hurry, just follow this link and (if you agree with it) add your name to a statement, hosted at Sense about Science, arguing that "The law has no place in scientific disputes". If you've got a little extra time to spend, read on.
Last week, at the same time that the U.S. Supreme Court was deciding the syntactic and semantic scope of knowingly in 18 U.S.C. sec. 1028A(a)(1), the English High Court decided, in effect, to insert wide-scope knowingly into a newspaper Op-Ed piece.