The Impact of the Tort of Defamation on Public Discourse About Racism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Where once ascriptions of race gave rise to defamation suits, now it is allegations of racism that are apt to prompt legal action. On the one hand, it is gratifying to see validated in tort law the notion that allegations of racism lower individuals in the estimation of ordinary members of the public. On the other, the content, structure, and practical dynamics of defamation law give rise to concerns about the potential of such suits to suppress public discourse about racism. Defamation is an easy claim to make and a difficult one to refute. This should be of concern to anyone who values freedom of expression, particularly so when the statements sought to be suppressed through a defamation suit involve allegations of racism leveled against powerful individuals and organizations. When a doctrinal tilt in favor of plaintiffs is combined with unequal race relations, defamation law becomes a very effective means by which to intimidate equality seekers into silence. If, as a society, we are committed to rooting out racism, we must first have the freedom to name it. At present, the tort of defamation operates to compromise that freedom. Reform is required to better balance the important values that defamation law protects against the value of freedom of expression so as to encourage rather than suppress public discussion of racism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".