The Eric Barendt Annual Media Law Lecture: Defamation Deficits

Defamation law and American political discourse are at a historically complicated intersection. Despite high constitutional hurdles, U.S. libel law has become the go-to tool for plaintiffs aiming to correct widespread, damaging lies about elections and elected officials. Indeed, on some key issues, defamation litigation has been the only meaningful tool for ascertaining and announcing a societally important truth. But as we look to defamation law to meet this new moment, we must also be sensitive to the ways in which it fails as an instrument for battling harmful conspiracy theories. We must acknowledge that a body of law designed to remedy reputational harm stops far short of addressing a broader environment of political lies. American defamation law struggles to curb the growing body of “delusional defamers,” who unknowingly become cogs in conspiratorial falsehoods that they themselves deeply believe. Other defamers’ political and profit incentives leave them largely undeterred by libel damages. The temptation to dilute the doctrine in the name of preventing disinformation is strong but misguided, as the law is simultaneously being weaponized to vilify, harass, and intimidate the independent press and other critics of the powerful. This lecture explores how, even as we celebrate defamation law’s successes against some of our most democracy-harming falsehoods, we must also appreciate its deficits. Libel law cannot, by itself, build a communications ecosystem rooted in provable, shared fact.

RonNell Andersen Jones

Professor RonNell Andersen Jones is a University Distinguished Professor and Teitelbaum Chair in Law at the University of Utah and an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. A former newspaper reporter and editor, Professor Andersen Jones is a First Amendment scholar who teaches, researches, and writes on legal issues affecting the press and on the intersection between the media and the courts. She is one of the foremost scholars on American press freedom, with work that addresses the role of journalism as a check on government and the constitutional and statutory rights of newsgatherers. She is a widely cited national expert on media defamation suits. Professor Andersen Jones’s scholarship has appeared in numerous books and journals, including Northwestern Law Review, Michigan Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Washington University Law Review, and the Harvard Law Review Forum, and she is co-editor of “The Future of Press Freedom: Democracy, Law, and the News in Changing Times,” forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. She is a frequent commentator on media-law matters for MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal. For the 2023-24 academic year, Professor Andersen Jones was a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. During Trinity Term 2025, she will be a research visitor at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at Oxford University.