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This is the law of defamation told through the fights that made it. You'll find out why a retweet counts as publishing, why "allegedly" won't save you, how a judge decides what a tweet actually meant, and why the claimant in a libel case so often ends up worse off than the person they sued. Along the way come Wagatha Christie, Laurence Fox and his paedophile tweets, Carole Cadwalladr's TED talk, Jack Monroe and Katie Hopkins, a solicitor's one-star review, Facebook comments, anonymous trolls, and the first lawsuits over chatbots that invented crimes.
It's mostly about England and Wales, but Scotland and Northern Ireland get their own say, and there are chapters on America, Australia, Canada and Europe, where the same post can be fine in one place and actionable in another. The back of the book has practical guidance for anyone who gets a complaint, a glossary, a table of cases and a guide to the statutes. Every case is real, and the law is as it stood in October 2026.
This is the law of defamation told through the fights that made it. You'll find out why a retweet counts as publishing, why "allegedly" won't save you, how a judge decides what a tweet actually meant, and why the claimant in a libel case so often ends up worse off than the person they sued. Along the way come Wagatha Christie, Laurence Fox and his paedophile tweets, Carole Cadwalladr's TED talk, Jack Monroe and Katie Hopkins, a solicitor's one-star review, Facebook comments, anonymous trolls, and the first lawsuits over chatbots that invented crimes.
It's mostly about England and Wales, but Scotland and Northern Ireland get their own say, and there are chapters on America, Australia, Canada and Europe, where the same post can be fine in one place and actionable in another. The back of the book has practical guidance for anyone who gets a complaint, a glossary, a table of cases and a guide to the statutes. Every case is real, and the law is as it stood in October 2026.