Can a government sue its citizens for &quot;libel&quot;? If a citizen of a nation is deliberately spreading lies against a given government of a country (let's say U.S. federal or state government) to undermine its capacity to act properly then can the government sue its own citizen for libel? Has it happened before?
"Seditious libel" has happened before, but not in the US. This comes up in NY Times v. Sullivan, which notes that For good reason, "no court of last resort in this country has ever held, or even suggested, that prosecutions for libel on government have any place in the American system of jurisprudence." City of Chicago v. Tribune Co., 307 Ill. 595, 601, 139 N.E. This Volokh article gives various citations showing that a government entity cannot sue for libel.
No. The government generally has no duty to protect private citizens from each other. It was different facts but basically the same question in DeShaney v. Winnebago Cty. DSS, 489 U.S. 189 (1989), where the Supreme Court held: A State's failure to protect an individual against private violence generally does not constitute a violation of the Due Process Clause, because the Clause imposes no duty on the State to provide members of the general public with adequate protective services. The Clause is phrased as a limitation on the State's power to act, not as a guarantee of certain minimal levels of safety and security; while it forbids the State itself to deprive individuals of life, liberty, and property without due process of law, its language cannot fairly be read to impose an affirmative obligation on the State to ensure that those interests do not come to harm through other means.
The word for a false statement of fact that is used most often is a &quot;misrepresentation&quot; or &quot;false representation of fact&quot; or more generally, an inaccurate quotation. A statement is a libel only if it damages the reputation of the person about whom one makes a misrepresentation and is communicated in writing to a third-party. Making a false statement of fact about what someone said to the person who said it is frequently a form of &quot;gaslighting.&quot;
There are two common defenses to defamation (there are others): That what you said is true. That what you said cannot be reasonably interpreted as a factual claim. If after examining the totality of the circumstances, a fact-finder (judge or jury) sees your statement to be an expression of opinion rather than a factual claim about the subject, you would not be found to have defamed the subject. The opinion defence doesn't have a bright line rule. In your example, I think it is clearly on the side of opinion. However, if you were to say something like "Douglas Dunce, Apple's Chief Engineer, has an IQ of 76", that would be almost certainly be deemed a factual claim. The leading case here is Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co. The court held that "statements that cannot reasonably be interpreted as stating actual facts about an individual are protected". Other summaries of this defence: http://www.defamationlawblog.com/2009/01/fact-vs-opinion-setting-the-record-straight/ http://www.rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/news-media-law/news-media-and-law-summer-2011/opinion-defense-remains-str
Can a state make a law that deputizes individuals to sue individuals in other states? This question (apart from the question below that implicates federalism concerns about a sister state court process in the secondary question below) would be resolved by the constitutional limitations on personal jurisdiction and choice of law. A state can have a law that authorizes a lawsuit for non-judicial system conduct against a non-resident of the state if it meets the requirements of &quot;long arm jurisdiction.&quot; The most succinct description of this requirement is that the person being sued &quot;personally availed themselves&quot; of the laws of the state whose law authorizes the lawsuit, in a manner that would reasonably be understood to subject that person to the state's legal authority. This could involve a lawsuit against someone outside the state arising from an incident that took place in the state. It could also involve a lawsuit against someone who took tortious action directed at a state or people in a state that caused harm, or a lawsuit arising from a business transaction that could reasonably be considered doing business in the state imposing that law. Constitutional law requirements on &quot;choice of law&quot; require that the state or foreign jurisdiction whose law is applied to a question in a dispute must have some meaningful connection to the disputed issue (subject to the backdrop rule that the law of a jurisdiction other than the forum where a case is litigated is presumed to be identical to that of the law of the state where the case is being litigated if no party provides any evidence or legal authorities to the contrary). Case law on state level qui tam litigation (which involve statutes that empower private individuals to sue someone who has wronged the government on its behalf for a share of the amount recovered for the government), the case law regarding private criminal prosecutions that are available in a handful of U.S. states, and some California consumer protection laws (which authorize suits without personal showing of actual damages in some cases when there are fraudulent advertisements) might also be relevant. So would the authority granted to bail bondsmen that is similar to law enforcement authority but limited to people authorized a person posting a bail bond for a criminal defendant who is subject to that authority. Concretely, if the constitutionality of the Texas law was upheld&lt;1&gt;, Texas probably can authorize a lawsuit against a California resident who would be involved in an abortion that took place in Texas that was illegal under Texas law. And, a judgment from a Texas court in a case like that would probably be entitled to full faith and credit in California. But, Texas probably couldn't constitutionally authorize a lawsuit against a California resident in connection with an abortion that took place in California. There would be, of course, many edge cases with no close past precedents, where the application of constitutional jurisdiction and choice of law limitations would be far less clear. &lt;1&gt; The majority opinion by five conservative justices other than the Chief Justice deciding not to stay enforcement of the law specifically limits itself to whether the proper parties were joined to the request to enjoin the statute and states &quot;this order is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law, and in no way limits other procedurally proper challenges to the Texas law, including in Texas state courts.&quot; A decision that has not been resolved on the merits. The Courts have merely declined to stay enforcement of the law pending the current litigation over the law's validity. Upholding the law on the merits would require courts to overturn existing precedents related to abortion restrictions and other legal issues. Is there any extra legal barrier that would prevent states with pro-choice legislatures from passing laws designed to counter the anti-abortion deputies? For example, California could pass a law that deputizes private California individuals to sue people who sue abortion providers, and could reimburse their court costs up to $10,000. This seems to be a separate question from the question in the title. A law of this character would probably not be upheld. Basically, it would make a state authorized legal process in one state's courts, actionable as illegal in another state. Generally speaking, interference in another state's legal process would either violate the &quot;dormant commerce clause&quot;, or the &quot;full faith and credit clause&quot;, or constitutional limits on jurisdiction and choice of law, or constitutional standing limitations (even though they don't apply in the same way in state courts as in federal courts, or the &quot;due process clause&quot; of the 5th or 14th Amendments, or the &quot;privileges and immunities clause.&quot; The exact legal theory isn't clear because there is really not history of litigation over this kind of legislation and you'd need to resort to vaguely analogous cases. The effort of Texas to litigate Pennsylvania election law administration following the 2020 election was recently dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court for lack of standing and that is suggestive of how this case might be resolved, even though it isn't strictly analogous. It is also informed by the long standing common law rule, that could conceivably have constitutional dimensions, that litigants participating in a court process in good faith are immune from collateral litigation in another lawsuit over their conduct in the original lawsuit. There isn't a lot of precedent one way or the other with laws having this kind of purpose, and none on a law exactly in this form. Indeed, a dissenting opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday by the Chief Justice and two of the liberal justices (with which the third liberal justice states he agrees without formally joining that opinion) stated that: The statutory scheme before the Court is not only unusual, but unprecedented. The legislature has imposed a prohibition on abortions after roughly six weeks, and then essentially delegated enforcement of that prohibition to the populace at large. The last time there was significant litigation of laws with a similar purpose that were adjudicated was in the pre-U.S. Civil War period in abolition of slavery oriented legislation. But, the post-Civil War amendments to the U.S. Constitution and subsequent development of constitutional case law would render most precedents from that time period infirm.
united-states Simply insulting someone without saying something false is not defamation in the U.S. (historically it was the subject of criminal defamation liability to might light of someone's disabilities or call them out in an insulting way, but later U.S. constitutional law jurisprudence interpreting the First Amendment in the late 20th century rendered these laws unconstitutional). If a statement might damage someone's reputation if taken literally, and the statement is false, it can be defamatory and give rise to civil liability (or criminal liability in the few states that still have criminal defamation statutes), if the people to whom the statement is &quot;published&quot; (i.e. the audience of the statement) could reasonably believe that the statement was intended to be taken literally. Whether a statement can be taken literally is an &quot;all of the facts and circumstances&quot; analysis. Statements meant only as hyperbole or parody or metaphorically, if a reasonable audience person would understand the statements in that sense, do not impose liability based upon what they would mean if taken literally. Other Countries As noted in the question itself, not all countries treat statements like this the same way. Germany imposes criminal liability for all manner of insults. England and Wales imposes defamation liability in many circumstances when U.S. law would not. And, many countries in Asia are closef to the German model of liability for insulting speech than they are to the U.S. model.
Typical in any of the several united-states No, this fails to meet two of the core elements of libel. The statement must be Adverse (fails) Stated by one party To a second party About a third party (fails) The case you're thinking of, where a company brags excessively about their company or products, are covered by a variety of securities and trade laws, such as false advertising. Many of these are applicable in the Federal domain, i.e. are Federal rather than state laws. Edit: Now I see you've changed the question a bit to claiming to be first. Yes, the injured party can sue for that, but they are more claiming false advertising than libel. Accusing someone of not being first-to-market is not a particularly powerful or damning claim. Oreo didn't invent the sandwich cookie nor did Apple invent the computer. So such a claim is really a lot more about the publicity than actual, provable damages; so the controversy is more likely to be aired outside the court system, or in the courts but mainly for the publicity. (an example of the latter being the &quot;Taco Tuesday&quot; trademark-busting action; IIRC Taco Bell even paid the other party's legal fees, despite prevailing.)
It is not the case that treason must be tried by a military tribunal. See for example US v. Kawakita, which was an ordinary civilian jury trial. I cannot even imagine why one would think that there is any such requirement. Here is the federal law against treason, and nothing says "offenses must be tried in a military court". Perhaps that misconception was based on the use of military tribunals during the American Revolution, which preceded the creation of a US legal system.