Since the Internet exploded onto the scene, defamation law has made a legal comeback. Nowadays, sometimes it seems like everybody is threatening to sue everybody else for “false statements” or “libel” or “defamation of character”. With so much talk of defamation law, one would naturally assume that libel is easily provable.

Guess again.

In the United States, defamation lawsuits are often difficult to win — especially Internet defamation. The history of how this came to be is just as entertaining as a troll’s exasperated online promise to, “sue your pants off because you called them a ‘%^$#@!-hat’” on your Facebook wall.

Alexander Hamilton Schooled Bill Cosby on What Constitutes Libel and Defamation

Between 1732 and 1736, Sir William Cosby (yes, his name was Bill Cosby) was the British head-honcho of New York. Billy was not well liked; after all, he was accused of trying to rig the 1734 elections (some things never change) and there was evidence he may have been pocketing a portion of collected taxes.

In 1733, John Peter Zenger, Editor of the New York Weekly Journal, angered Cosby by printing anonymous opinion pieces criticizing the Governor. Bill demanded the New York Assembly grant him permission to publically burn copies of Zenger’s New York Weekly in public (because that’s how they rolled back then), but the Assembly refused Cosby’s request. No matter, Cosby was a big fan of totalitarian oppression, so he just got one of his cronies, Chief Justice DeLancey, to disbar Zenger’s attorneys and then threw Zenger in prison.

Benjamin Franklin caught wind of the situation in New York and wasn’t having any of it. Ben convinced his buddy, Alexander Hamilton, to represent poor Pete Zenger. In those days, you were guilty until proven innocent, so that fact that Hamilton won, was, and still is, impressive-convincing a jury panel that the law being adjudicated was not a good law is no small feat. He argued that “truth should be an absolute defense against libel charges”-a judicial principle which still applies today.

1960′s: The Supreme Court Makes it Really, Really Difficult to Prove Defamation or Libel

During the 1960′s, at the height of the civil rights era, many northern papers shied away from printing articles about what was happening in the south. Libel and defamation laws were written in such a way that public figures could slap a suit against a paper with very little evidence. In a short period of time, southern groups and leaders had managed to file over $300-million dollars worth of lawsuits against news outlets they claimed were printing libelous and defamatory statements.

The New York Times decided to tackle the issue head-on in the groundbreaking 1964 trial, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. The legal details of the case are complex and the outcome drastically altered what constitutes an actionable libel or defamation legal suit. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the plaintiff in a defamation case must prove that either a) the offender knew that their statement was false, or b) the defendant didn’t engage in proper due diligence to try and accurately verify the information.

In the 1970′s, with regards to libel and defamation jurisprudence, things started to really heat up. At times, it was like a three-ring circus. Jerry Fallwell sued Hustler Magazine for libel over a cartoon; and the advent of the internet brought with it an entirely new set of legal uncertainties that are still being hashed out in the court system today…but you’ll have to check back for our second installment of this series to get all the dirt.