On: Press freedom advocates alarmed by $300,000 defamation verdict against...

2 September 2026

A Louisiana supreme court justice sued the state’s largest newspaper for saying something critical about him, and a jury of his neighbors awarded him $300,000. The justice sits on the very bench that would hear the appeal of his own lawsuit, which I suppose is one way of keeping a matter in the family. The newspaper, being prudent, will now think twice before printing anything unkind about a judge, and the judges, being human, will find this arrangement satisfactory.

I have always wondered why we bother with juries of ordinary citizens when the parties to a dispute can be trusted to settle things among themselves. It saves time. A man who has spent his career deciding what the law means is plainly the best judge of whether the law has been unkind to him. The rest of us lack the training to see the injustice clearly, and so we are spared the trouble.

The newspaper’s editors say the verdict will make publishers “more wary of critical reporting.” This is put forward as a warning, but it reads to me like a success. A wary publisher is a comfortable publisher, and a comfortable publisher is a welcome guest at the courthouse. The whole machinery works like a well-oiled mill: the grain goes in, the criticism is ground out, and the flour comes back to feed the men who built the mill.

I spent some years in the newspaper trade myself, and I can report that we were never much troubled by lawsuits, for the simple reason that we were too poor to be worth suing. Poverty was our shield and our privilege. Now the papers have grown rich, and the judges have grown litigious, and the truth must pick its way down the levee like a man crossing thin ice in Sunday shoes - moving slowly, apologizing to the river with every step.

The freedom of the press remains, I am told, in excellent health. It has simply agreed to stay indoors.