Readers who enjoy the intersection of tort law and cyberlaw may wish
to download an article recently posted to SSRN and authored by Leslie Yalof Garfield (pictured), a professor at Pace University School of Law. The article is titled Birds of a Feather: Libel and Slander in the Age of Twitter.
Here's the abstract:
This article focuses on the whether defamatory text messages should be
treated as libel or slander. The law treats written defamation and
spoken defamation differently; requiring stricter standards for recovery
from defamatory verbal communication. Recent lawsuits have tested the
boundaries of this century’s old law, which does not contemplated the
kind of instant non-permanent texting communication that mobile phones
now permit. Decades ago, the advent of broadcast journalism suggested
the need to treat communication through the airwaves as something
different than written words, even when the communication was broadcast
from a written script. This article argues that texting, like broadcast
communications, comes with its own set of rules, not contemplated at
common law, and that the circumstances surrounding defamatory
information communicated via texting demand that it be labeled as
slander.
Perhaps before I read the article I should ask my nine-year-old daughter (Grace) to explain this "Twitter" phenomenon to me.