Word: libels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...their coverage of Dr. John Bodkin Adams' trial on a charge of murder, five London newspapers-the Daily Mail, News Chronicle, Daily Telegraph, Evening Standard and Daily Mirror-had libel writs from Dr. Adams' lawyers...
...separate action resulting from the Adams case. Britain's biggest newsstand distributor, W. H. Smith & Son. announced that henceforth it will 1) screen all foreign newspapers and magazines for material that seems to violate the libel and contempt laws, and 2) handle no publications that do not have a British representative who can be held responsible in the event of court judgments. In addition, Smith's asked foreign publishers to indemnify them against fines and other expenses levied on them as a result of material in publications distributed by them...
...need, said the New Statesman and Nation, for "a thorough overhaul of the law governing contempt of court, with its arbitrary powers . . . and its medieval refusal of all right of appeal." But, as the Manchester Guardian pointed out, "there is no clear way out of the thicket"'of libel and contempt strictures. Britain's libel laws are an uncodified mass of legal decisions from which lawyers have never culled a satisfactory definition of defamation. They make Britain's press the most suit-harried in the world...
...Britain, the courts still tend to view defamatory or contemptuous statements by newspapers more gravely than their American counterparts. British newspapers seldom win a libel suit; U.S. papers win at least as many as they lose. In the U.S., keyhole-peeping columnists are rarely sued for running exaggerated or even fabricated accounts of celebrities' loves and lapses. But privacy-proud Englishmen do not treat unfavorable stories as unworthy of notice-not to the extent of refraining from a promising libel suit...
...Angeles County grand jury last week landed the first solid blow on the peeping eye of Confidential's Publisher Robert Harrison. Harrison, already beset by $28.5 million in libel suits, and ten confederates were indicted on charges of conspiracy to publish criminal libel, to distribute lewd and obscene material and to disseminate illegal information about abortions and male rejuvenation. As California Assistant Attorney General Clarence Linn said, perhaps optimistically: "In my opinion, Confidential is finished...