Across the country, and all over the world, rich and powerful interests use lawsuits to retaliate against their critics and deter further scrutiny. They are called SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation). They are meritless actions designed to financially cripple and ultimately silence targets.
Victims are frequently journalists, activists, academics, whistleblowers, and protesters, but can be anyone exercising their First Amendment right to free expression and engaged in the often-perilous practice of speaking truth to power.
There have been thousands of such lawsuits since the tactic was first identified and examined in 1988, and 35 states plus the District of Columbia have passed laws to help people facing them fight back. But those laws vary in quality from state to state. And 15 states have no anti-SLAPP protections on the books. Federal legislation, meanwhile, has remained elusive, hampered by a dearth of reliable data on the scope of the problem.
First Amendment Watch, a nonprofit newsroom housed at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, is building the first national database of SLAPPs, conducting an extensive review of the public record to identify every previous application of anti-SLAPP statutes in the states that have passed anti-SLAPP laws and analyzing the data to reveal repeat offenders and frequent targets.
