From Jason Linkins at Huffington Post:
According to reports, Republican legislators are having an uneasy time cottoning to the notion that real estate developer and white-supremacist cuddle muppet Donald Trump seems to be on the glide path to becoming their party’s standard-bearer.
Read MorePPP Policy Director Evan Mascagni was quoted in a new article about an ongoing legal dispute involving Trump University:
SLAPP, Mascagni explained to Sinclair stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.
“It’s basically a lawsuit brought to silence a critic,” Mascagni explained. Opposed to going to court to seek justice, the person bringing the SLAPP attempts to drown the critic in legal fees.
Read MoreFrom Mike Masnick with Techdirt:
"Mother Jones, the well-known, politically-focused publication, has prevailed in a ridiculous SLAPP suit filed by billionaire Frank VanderSloot. VanderSloot was upset about a 2012 profile that Mother Jones published about him, his multi-level marketing, dietary supplement company Melaleuca, and the millions of dollars he was donating to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. VanderSloot insisted that the article was defamatory, though you’ll have to squint really hard to figure out where and how.
Read MoreFrom Corey Hutchins with Columbia Journalism Review:
"IN A CASE THAT HIGHLIGHTS both a point of potential vulnerability for many news startups and the significance of broad anti-SLAPP statutes, a California judge this week dismissed a lawsuit against inewsource.org, a nonprofit investigative newsroom in San Diego.
In the world of media lawsuits, this one was anything but ordinary. The suit had been brought in April by San Diegans for Open Government, a local nonprofit, and though it took aim at inewsource’s basic operating model, it didn’t go directly after the newsroom’s editorial output.
Read MoreFrom Mike Masnick at TechDirt:
"Okay, look. We’ve really tried to ignore Chuck Johnson. It’s pretty obvious that he’s the kind of guy who does a bunch of the stuff that he does to get more attention. We’ve never covered his various hilarious legal threats, though you can see a bunch of them nicely cataloged at this website. If you’re not aware, you can do some Google searches, but suffice it to say that he plays a “journalist” on the internet, and he’s somewhat infamous for the various stunts he pulls, combined with his penchant for threatening people with libel, as well as for many of his biggest stories being, well… ridiculous. A few weeks ago he threw something of a public tantrum because Twitter kicked him off its service. He had a lawyer in Missouri, John Burns, send a ridiculous threat letter to Twitter, based on an interpretation of the law that might be described as “crazy” by some and… “wrong” by many others.
Read MoreA flooring company brought a defamation lawsuit against a Colorado couple for negative reviews they left on Yelp. The parties eventually settled the suit, but the dispute cost the defendant $65,000 in legal fees.
Read MoreFrom Pioneer Press:
"Keith Mueller is pushing to change a state law to protect someone from being sued for calling the cops.
The law’s current language protecting public participation is too vague and needs to include reporting apparent unlawful conduct to police, he argues.
Mueller’s effort stems from his experience: He was sued by a man whose acts were the subject of a report to police.
Read MoreTim Evans, The Indianapolis Star's consumer advocate, writes about “bad reviews and lawsuits.”
Read MoreA miner in Kentucky was sued by his former employer after filing a discrimination suit against the mining company. The miner had raised concerns about the safety of working conditions before being fired, and claimed the mine’s lawsuit was filed “expressly to send a message” to employees who spoke up about safety problems.
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