The American Pundit

Unbelievable. The New York Sun reports:

New York’s highest court turned down a chance today to protect American authors from libel judgments awarded by foreign courts.

The case decided today, which pits a Saudi billionaire against a New York-based researcher, was a test of how New York’s courts will respond to concerns that the First Amendment rights of American authors are being undermined by libel judgments imposed abroad, especially in Britain.

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Today the Court of Appeals in Albany said that New York law did not allow the researcher, Rachel Ehrenfeld, to seek a court order saying that a British judgment against her was unenforceable under the First Amendment. The Court said it did not have jurisdiction over the Saudi financier and that Ms. Ehrenfeld’s suit to block the judgment must be dismissed.

The court’s opinion, written by Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick, an appointee of Governor Cuomo, largely sidesteps any of Ms. Ehrenfeld’s First Amendment considerations.

Of “libel tourism,” the decision states: “However pernicious the effect of this practice may be, our duty here is to determine whether defendant’s New York contacts establish a proper basis for jurisdiction.”

Bryan provides some background on the case:

Ehrenfeld is a US citizen and her book wasn’t published in the UK. Her book entered the UK via Amazon, yet a UK court saw fit to award bin Mafouz damages against her and ordered her to apologize and keep her book, which hadn’t been published in the UK, out of the UK. There is no way she can reasonably be expected to do that, even if you assume that her book is libelous (which is dubious, to say the least). The UK court ought not to have ruled on the case at all, as it has no standing to judge a US citizen whose work wasn’t published in the UK. But it did, and now the US court has decided not to protect US citizens against this pernicious use of the UK’s courts.

You can find the ruling here. I’m not a lawyer, and won’t pretend to be. I don’t know where the case should go from here, but I know this opinion is absolute crap. As Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, says, Congress needs to get involved.