Louisiana passes anti-sharia and libel tourism laws
n baseball, this is like a double header sweep…after losing almost every game for the last 16 months or more.
An attempt to keep Islamic sharia law out of Louisiana’s courts. It sounds vague and unconvincing but Louisiana is the second state that has moved to enact such legislation in as many months. Oklahoma served up a no-sharia bill as well.
And since the feds aren’t in a rush to pass a national Libel Tourism law it’s smart for states to protect their citizen writers.
Within minutes Monday a legislative committee repudiated both Islamic and British law.
Neither, perhaps, represents an immediate threat to justice in Louisiana, but it was not entirely an alarmist and xenophobic stunt when the committee approved two bills by Rep. Ernest Wooton, R-Belle Chase. Mostly, but not entirely.
One of Wooton’s bills, which provides that no foreign law shall be applied here if it violates a right guaranteed by the American Constitution, is by any rational measure superfluous. But it is not unknown for immigrant litigants to invoke the tenets of Sharia to which, the committee was told, the Maryland courts deferred in a child custody case.
The Louisiana Supreme Court has so far insisted that cases in America are settled according to American law, but the committee figured it was wise to commit future jurists to that sound principle. At least the bill does no harm.
Wooton’s other bill may be largely symbolic too, although it is worth passing just in case. It does not single out the Limeys, but its refusal to enforce foreign defamation judgments that are “repugnant to the public policy of this state” is clearly aimed at them. Other states have passed, or are considering, similar legislation in response to a libel award rendered in London against the American writer Rachel Ehrenfeld.
It must be embarrassing for the British when American legislators lump them together with the avatars of medieval repression, but plenty of them are evidently aware it is fair, at least in the context of libel law. As a general election approaches, all three major parties in the UK promise to reform laws that have created “libel tourism” on the very island where John Milton wrote the book on press freedom, “Areopagitica.” That was in 1644, so it’s about time the government got the hang of it.
Instead the law enables large corporations or deep-pocketed individuals to stifle freedom of expression far beyond the shores of Britain, increasingly so in the Internet age, as Ehrenfeld discovered when her book “Funding Evil” identified Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz as a financial supporter of al-Qaida.
bin Mahfouz was not about to sue in this country and not just because he would have had to contend with the First Amendment. He has such an unsavory past that he would probably have been ruled libel-proof in any case. No need to go into detail here. You can take my word for it. He won’t sue me.
~~~There are other states that have passed this too but none of them have USA spelled in order like the GREAT state of LoUiSiAna!!
Thank you very much for your detailed reply. My short comment would be IMHO it is up to the states - and counties - to start demanding our rights as delineating in the Constitution. One county at a time, one state at a time.