Tolofson and Flames in Cyberspace: The Changing Landscape of Multistate Defamation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.005 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it