Another piece of the proposed changes to Nevada’s anti-SLAPP law, this time from our friends over at Techdirt:
"We’ve mentioned many times the importance of anti-SLAPP laws in protecting people who are being sued solely to try to shut them up. It’s still a travesty that we don’t have a federal anti-SLAPP law but are reliant on various state anti-SLAPP laws. In case you’re not familiar with them, SLAPP stands for “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.” Anti-SLAPP laws basically allow people who are sued to quickly get lawsuits dismissed when it’s obvious that the entire point of the lawsuit is to silence whoever is being sued, rather than for any legitimate legal purpose. For years, California was seen as having one of the best anti-SLAPP laws, but in recent years both Texas and Nevada upped the ante in anti-SLAPP laws, making them even stronger. Nevada’s had a particularly useful feature: it would award “reasonable costs, attorney’s fees and monetary relief” for defendants who were wrongfully hit with SLAPP suits. Basically, it provided a real deterrent against SLAPP suits.
However, just two years after unanimously passing that bill, the Nevada Senate has justunanimously repealed that important provision, in the form of SB 444. If you take a look at the bill, you’ll see it explicitly repeals the fee shifting section. Apparently, some people didn’t like the fact that they might have to pay up for filing bogus lawsuits trying to stifle speech. If that were all it did it, it would be tragic enough, but as Popehat clearly describes, the bill also undermines the rest of the anti-SLAPP law in pretty nefarious ways, making the existing rules toothless."
Read more here.