Occasionally I think our speech in the U.S. is a little too free – like when the tabloids traffic in gossips that should make the purveyor and the consumer both want to go home and shower off the slime. It’s the sort of thing that well-formed Christians will shun, but it’s pervasive in our culture.

But I’ll take our free-wheeling system in a heartbeat over the British system where libel suits are used to silence critics, and where the burden is on the critic to prove that what he said was true, not on the target to prove that it was false.

Even the British system comes out okay in the end sometimes, as told in “Now Charlatans will know to beware the geeks.” It seems that one “Simon Singh had written an article which was true and important about the dangers of the quack therapy of chiropractic healing.” In classic British libel law form, British chiropractors tried to kill the messenger:

Then, like so many authors and publishers before him, he learnedEnglish law persecuted rather than protected honest argument and that he was in trouble.

The British Chiropractic Association was suing him for saying that there was “not a jot of evidence” that its members could help sick children by manipulating babies’ spines in accordance with the teachings of a more-than-usually nutty American faith healer.

Well-run societies do not defend men who make money from worried parents and, more seriously, fob off their children with bogus “cures”. In his wisdom, however, Mr Justice Eady decided that the law would intervene to silence a debate on public health and ruled that it would not be enough for Singh to show that there was no reliable evidence that alleged treatments worked, which Singh would have difficulty in doing because there wasn’t. Because he had written that the chiropractic association “happily promotes bogus treatments”, the judge said he had to jump the insuperable barrier of proving that the therapists were lying rather than merely deluded and face costs of £500,000 or more if he failed.

But this time the intimidation didn’t work:

Far from being depressed, the audience turned into a heaving mass of furious geeks, who roared their anger and vowed that they would not rest until they had brought down the rotten system The “skeptic movement” (always spelt with “k” by the way, to emphasise their distinctiveness) had come to Singh’s aid. He was now in the protective custody of men and women, who, with straight faces, introduced themselves by the titles of their blogs: “Hi, I’m Gimpy.”

“Jack of Kent, pleased to meet you, love your writing. This is Holford Watch, Zeno, Jago, and I thought I saw the Quackometer getting a round in at the bar.”

Unnerved by their determination, I said to Ben Goldacre, demolisher of pseudo-science in all its fraudulent forms: “The nerds are on the march. I wouldn’t like to be the one standing in their way.” An uncharacteristically mystical look passed over the great debunker’s face. “Yes,” he said. “Strike us down, we shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”

Full disclosure: I go to a Chiropractor the way I went to my M.D. before I had a chronic condition that needed monitoring: when I’ve got a problem I think he can help, typically a characteristic headache that seems to originate in neck and shoulders. I’ve never met the kind of chiropractor who make sweeping claims:

Meanwhile, their allies tracked down the web pages of every chiropractor in Britain who was claiming they could treat asthmatic children and reported him or her to their local trading standards officer.

Back to the U.S.A. In my experience, lawsuits are used to silence critics here as well, despite our free speech tradition. It may not be a straight-up libel suit, but rather may take the form of an “intentional infliction of emotional distress” claim or even a discrimination claim if the quack is in some sort of minority. I’m defending one right now (it’s unusual for me to litigate).

The problem is well-enough known that states have enacted laws to punish those who start the aptly-named SLAPP suites – Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation.

I once was sued in a SLAPP by my city government for signing a petition asking it to enforce a zoning ordinance. Diana Vice, who blogs at Welcome to My Tea Party, has been sued by a roofing contractor in something that – let me be cautious here – fairly plausibly looks like a SLAPP suit by a roofing contractor that does a lot of work for school systems in ways that Vice finds fishy.

I wish Judges wouldn’t be so hesitant to impose an award of attorney fees to a winning defendant, because these suits are effective to at least “chill” free speech on important topics as long as there’s a prospect of spending unreimbursed 5-figure attorney fees as the price of speaking out.

Also, it’s particularly important that guys like Singh prevail in Britain because British law is being used to silence critics in cyberspace, which knows no borders, world-wide — on the theory that the American author spoke or “published” in Great Britain, which accordingly has jurisdiction to entertain complaints of the aggrieved — oh, let’s say Czech. You get the idea. Because someone in Britain read it on the internet, British courts can referee the spat between two non-Brits.

And it’s especially gratifying that the cyber-community mustered the evidence to win Singh’s suit.