Free Speech Rights: Anti-SLAPP Laws Of The U.S. Ranked By Quality
Anti-SLAPP laws suppress the censorship of free expression through lawfare.
Anti-SLAPP laws are statutes that provide a substantive right of a person to an early dismissal of causes of action brought against them with the effect of silencing or punishing their First Amendment (and corresponding state constitutional) rights to freedom of speech and to petition. The idea ― which has been proven to be very successful ― is to prevent a plaintiff from using the heavy monetary and emotional expense of litigation to grind down a defendant, even if the plaintiff's lawsuit is ultimately shown to be meritless. Anti-SLAPP laws accomplish this by, basically, moving the summary judgment motion from the end of a case to the start of the case and imposing a stay of the litigation until the Anti-SLAPP motion is resolved by the court.
Which U.S. jurisdiction has the best Anti-SLAPP laws? This article rates the Anti-SLAPP laws of the U.S. states and territories. There were many factors considered, but the primary considerations went to scope (breadth of protection), the availability of an automatic stay of the litigation or at least of discovery, the availability of a mandatory appeal of right to an unsuccessful movant, the awarding of attorneys fees and costs, and whether the statute contains a uniformity of interpretation provision to deter forum shopping. An ancillary purpose of this article is to let state legislatures know where their Anti-SLAPP statutes are deficient (or that they do not have one at all) so that these problems may be remedied.
Because the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act ("UPEPA") uniquely satisfies all of the requirements, the states that have adopted the UPEPA are automatically granted an "A" rating. The states that have very good organic Anti-SLAPP laws, but do not have the benefit of the UPEPA's uniformity provision fall into the "B" category. States with workable but flawed Anti-SLAPP statutes get a "C" while the states with mostly useless statutes get a "D". The states with no Anti-SLAPP law at all of course merit an "F".
So here we go:
Quality Anti-SLAPP statute, including provision for uniformity of interpretation to prevent forum-shopping and enhance quality of court opinions.
Quality Anti-SLAPP statute, but without provision for uniformity of interpretation.
Average Anti-SLAPP statute, but restricted in scope and/or lacking important protective provisions.
Poor Anti-SLAPP statute, significantly restricted in scope and without most important protective provisions.
No Anti-SLAPP statute. The legislatures of these states (and Puerto Rico) are asleep at the switch.
Well, that's it. As Anti-SLAPP laws do not change very often, I doubt that this will be anything like an annual list. Still, it may be interesting to look back in several years to see where these gaps in Anti-SLAPP law have finally been filled.
Or not.
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The Hill
23 minutes ago
- The Hill
A lesson on nuclear weapons for Iran, from its neighbor, Pakistan
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Second, Pakistan made itself useful to the U.S. in the insurgency against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and the U.S. punitive expedition in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021. In the 1980s, Pakistan distributed U.S. weapons and money to the anti-Soviet mujahideen; America obliged by overlooking Pakistan's development of nuclear weapons, though the U.S. stopped its 'willful gullibility' in 1990 when President George H.W. Bush was no longer able to certify that Pakistan no longer possessed a nuclear weapon. Many in Pakistan believe America no longer needed them in Afghanistan and so betrayed its long-standing ally, but the real reason may have been the Kashmir crisis that caused Pakistan to raise the enrichment of its uranium to weapons grade, which 'removed the last fig leaf.' After 9/11, Pakistan's leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, provided the U.S. with logistical support, intelligence cooperation and access to military bases. In return, Pakistan received billions in military and economic aid — but never severed its ties with the Taliban or the Haqqani Network. Pakistan hosted ground lines of communication for resupply of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and made Karachi's Port Qasim available for military cargo. U.S. reliance on Pakistan for overland logistics was near-complete; Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U,S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, finally admitted, 'The Haqqani network … acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.' The U.S. military was prepared to overlook troop deaths in Afghanistan due to Pakistan, but it always highlighted the claim that over 600 American troops in Iraq were killed due to Iran's actions. Mullen's complaint tipped Pakistan's brass that if you kill Americans, the Pentagon will let it slide if you have something it desperately needs, like access to a battlefield. 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According to a 2018 research paper, co-authored by Gyourko, that surveyed 44 major U.S. metro areas, land-use regulations in Miami and Phoenix both ranked in the top 10 most restrictive (just behind Washington, D.C., and L.A. and ahead of Boston), and Dallas and Nashville were in the top 25. Because the survey is based on responses from local governments, it might understate just how bad zoning in the Sun Belt is. 'When I first opened up the zoning code for Atlanta, I almost spit out my coffee,' Alex Armlovich, a senior housing-policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank, told me. 'It's almost identical to L.A. in the 1990s.' These restrictive rules weren't a problem back when Sun Belt cities could expand by building new single-family homes at their exurban fringes indefinitely. That kind of development is less likely to be subject to zoning laws; even when it is, obtaining exceptions to those laws is relatively easy because neighbors who might oppose new development don't exist yet. Recently, however, many Sun Belt cities have begun hitting limits to their outward sprawl, either because they've run into natural obstacles (such as the Everglades in Miami and tribal lands near Phoenix) or because they've already expanded to the edge of reasonable commute distances (as appears to be the case in Atlanta and Dallas). To keep growing, these cities will have to find ways to increase the density of their existing urban cores and suburbs. That is a much more difficult proposition. 'This is exactly what happened in many coastal cities in the 1980s and '90s,' Armlovich told me. 'Once you run out of room to sprawl, suddenly your zoning code starts becoming a real limitation.' Glaeser and Gyourko go one step further. They hypothesize that as Sun Belt cities have become more affluent and highly educated, their residents have become more willing and able to use existing laws and regulations to block new development. They point to two main pieces of evidence. First, for a given city, the slowdown in new housing development strongly correlates with a rising share of college-educated residents. Second, within cities, the neighborhoods where housing production has slowed the most are lower-density, affluent suburbs populated with relatively well-off, highly educated professionals. In other words, anti-growth NIMBYism might be a perverse but natural consequence of growth: As demand to live in a place increases, it attracts the kind of people who are more likely to oppose new development, and who have the time and resources to do so. 'We used to think that people in Miami, Dallas, Phoenix behaved differently than people in Boston and San Francisco,' Gyourko told me. 'That clearly isn't the case.' Real-world examples aren't hard to find. In early 2024, an affordable-housing developer proposed a project for an 85-unit apartment building in an affluent suburb of San Antonio. The apartments would have consisted entirely of subsidized units reserved for low-income residents, and the building would have included an on-site preschool. The project had buy-in from the city government, but a handful of local residents opposed it, citing concerns such as traffic, crime, and the height of the building. 'It's too much—we're turning into Houston,' one nearby resident told the planning commission in April. 'I would appreciate if you all would keep San Antonio residential and feeling like home.' Those residents took advantage of a 1927 Texas law known as the 'valid petition,' a procedure originally introduced as a way to preserve segregation after the Supreme Court struck down explicitly racial zoning. Under the law, any effort by a developer to get an exemption from a zoning ordinance (say, to build apartments on land zoned for retail) can be blocked if the owners of just 20 percent of the land within 200 feet of the proposed project site file a petition opposing the effort. At that point, the only way to rescue the project is to summon a three-fourths supermajority vote by the city council. In San Antonio, that meant nine of the city's 11 council members would need to vote to overturn the valid petition. In the end, only seven did. The project was killed. Experts told me that from the mid-20th century through the 2000s, valid petitions were hardly used in Texas. But in recent years they have become such a common way to kill new projects that they have earned the nickname 'the tyrant's veto.' They have been wielded against, among other things, a hospital expansion in Dallas, student housing in Bryan, and Habitat for Humanity houses in Austin. According to Nicole Nosek, the chair and founder of Texans for Reasonable Solutions, a pro-housing advocacy organization, the law chills development before it even gets proposed in the first place. 'Developers call it 'the silent killer,'' Nosek told me. 'Many of them don't even try to propose projects in places like East Austin, because they know that one person could stir up enough trouble to kill it altogether.' Justin Webb, the owner of a small family-owned home-building business in Dallas, told me that when he started out in 1990, the local environment was 'every builder's dream.' Not anymore. 'Now everything is a negotiation; everything is a process,' Webb said. He cited a project first proposed in May 2022 to turn a run-down strip mall in North Dallas into a mixed-use development with 2,300 new housing units alongside offices, retail, walking paths, and green space. After three years of local opposition and several contentious community meetings, the proposal has been scaled back to just 868 units. And it faces a lawsuit filed by a local neighborhood association that might kill it altogether. 'A lot of times, the last person to move in wants to close the door and throw away the key,' Webb said. 'I think that's what's happening all over Texas right now.' Texas isn't an outlier. Similar anecdotes abound in cities such as Orlando, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Atlanta. This trend has turned some of the most developer-friendly cities into absolute nightmares for home builders. Olga Khazan: Why people won't stop moving to the Sun Belt When Mike Vasquez began working for his family's Arizona-based construction business in the 1980s, he told me, he could walk into the local planning office with a proposal 'written on a napkin' and get approval for a new project within hours. 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If current trends continue, then in 20 years, the housing crisis in cities such as Miami, Phoenix, and Atlanta will be as severe as it is in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York today. The good news is that these cities have been warned. They can look at the crisis plaguing their coastal counterparts, see into their not-so-far-off future, and choose to do something about it. Some already have. In 2021, Raleigh, North Carolina, responded to an influx of new residents by reforming its laws to make building multifamily housing much easier. Over the next three years, the city built 60 percent more units annually and experienced half the rental-cost growth than it had during the previous five years, according to data gathered by Alex Horowitz, the project director for housing policy at the Pew Charitable Trusts. The forces opposed to new development are just as vehemently opposed to the kind of reforms needed to avert a future crisis. Many local and state governments across the Sun Belt have tried and failed to implement lasting pro-housing reforms. But the recent spike in home prices across the region has put even more pressure on lawmakers to act. The Texas legislature recently passed several pieces of legislation that will, among other things, reduce the minimum lot size of new homes, limit the power of the 'tyrant's veto,' and allow multifamily housing to be built on land currently zoned for offices and retail. Red states like to portray themselves as free from the pathologies that have made housing such a problem in other parts of the country. Now they have an opportunity to prove it.
New York Post
4 hours ago
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