Tolofson and Flames in Cyberspace: The Changing Landscape of Multistate Defamation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This early paper, published at a time when legal issues relating to the internet were still relatively new, examines the conflict of laws issues surrounding on-line defamation claims, and particularly the question of what choice of law should apply in Canada in light of the Canadian Supreme Court decision in Tolfson v. Jensen (1994), which established a new choice of law rule for tort cases involving conflict of laws. The paper begins by suggesting that on-line defamation claims will likely increase dramatically in the coming years, and examines the conflict of laws issues that will thus arise. It proceeds to examine the nature of the tort of defamation, emphasizing that the complex area of law is primarily concerned with protecting the private right to protection of one's reputation, which in turn will inform the analysis for choice of law. Next the analysis moves to an overview of the conflict of laws rules that governed defamation and all other tort claims prior to Tolofson, with the choice of law rule having been that to ground a claim a plaintiff had to prove that the wrong was actionable under the law of the forum in which the claim was made(lex fori), and that it was not justifiable under the law of the jurisdiction in which the tort was committed (lex loci). Moving to an analysis of the reasons in Tolofson, an automobile accident insurance claim case, the paper reviews the Court's establishment of lex loci delecti as the new rule governing choice of law in tort cases involving multiple jurisdictions. The paper analyzes the extent to which the Court may have left room for an exception for those cases in which the tort occurs in one jurisdiction but the greatest harm is suffered in another. Finally, the paper considers the nature of multi-state defamation via the internet, and queries the extent to which it really raises new and novel issues that require unique rules. It makes the modest claim that there are some circumstances in which on-line defamation may raise new issues. The paper concludes by suggesting that a consideration of the values that defamation law seeks to protect, the nature of on-line defamtion, and the narrow exception that the reasons in Tolofson may permit, would form a basis for a specific rule for choice of law in on-line defamation cases, that being to apply the law of the place of greatest harm.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".