A town called Sue: Libel tourism.

AuthorMoynihan, Michael C.
PositionCitings - Brief article

IN 1999 Icelandic economist Hannes Gissurarson was sued in a British court for comments he made on an Icelandic website about an Icelandic colleague. According to the London Times, the case has cost Gissurarson more than 150,000 [pounds sterling], forcing him to sell his home. (It has not yet been resolved.) The case illustrates the "libel tourism" that has earned London the derisive appellation "a town called sue."

In 2005 Cambridge University Press pulped the academic book Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic Worm in response to a libel lawsuit brought by the Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz, whom the book's authors accused of financing Islamic radicalism. The publisher pulled the book from its catalog and took the unprecedented step of requesting that libraries return all purchased copies to be destroyed. Bin Mahfouz also sued Rachel Ehrenfeld--the American author of Funding Evil, which made similar accusations--in London, even though...

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