Lawsuits and the law as forms of censorship

One way to stifle speech is to frighten people into silence by threatening to sue them for millions of dollars if they
speak up. That is what happened to James Randi when he wrote that Uri Geller, who claims to have psychic
powers, is a fraud, a magician, and con artist. That is what happened to several people who have publicly criticized
Scientology. That is what happened to journalist Andrew Skolnick for his investigative report on health fraud by
the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his Transcendental Meditation Movement. The purpose of the lawsuits is to harass
and intimidate critics.
Shortly after the ratification of the first amendment, Congress passed a sedition act that made it illegal to
criticize the government. Such uses of the law continue in our own day. Florida made it illegal to criticize their
citrus crops. Presumably this was done to protect a vital economic interest, but environmentalists fear they can be
sued or arrested for writing about pesticides in foods. Whatever the goal of such legislation, it has the effect of
censorship. Several states have followed Florida’s example, including Texas, which has a “perishable food
disparagement law.” Celebrity Oprah Winfrey was sued by some cattle ranchers for libeling beef on her television
program. She had said that she’d eaten her last burger after a guest on her show stated that American cattle could
be infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the so-called mad cow disease. Winfrey won the
lawsuit, but one wonders what chilling effect on free speech such suits will have on others.
Harassment lawsuits have led the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
(CSICOP) to form a Legal Defense Foundation. What does that say to us? We pride ourselves in being the freest
country in the world. Yet, the expression of skeptical opinions or truthful observations critical of psychics,
occultists, and paranormals are in danger of being stifled. The Legal Defense Foundation, says CSICOP, is “the
best way to blunt this frightening new weapon of the apostles of nonsense.”15 I’m not so sure. California and New
York have passed laws to provide relief for victims of harassment lawsuits. That seems to me to be a better way to
deal with this type of censorship. Make the plaintiffs in frivolous defamation suits pay all the legal costs and make
it easy for defendants in such cases to collect their legal expenses. I would also like to see the defendants awarded
damages in the amount of the original suit, should it be declared to be frivolous. So, if the scientologists sue me for
$20,000,000 for calling Scientology the rankest pseudoscience of the twentieth century, and the court decides their
suit is frivolous, intended to harass and intimidate me, then the scientologists pay me $20,000,000. Sounds fair to
me.