Irish News fined for restaurant review.

I don't think the McLibel applies very much to restaurant reviews. In the McLibel case, the defendants defamatory and unsubstantiated writings were presented as fact, not opinion. The judge specifically called that out as the crux of why it constituted libel. I think that pamphlet would have been actionable in the USA, too.

A restaurant review, on the other hand, is presented as personal opinion (that is what "review" means), and the average reasonable reader would recognize it as such.

Even in light of McLibel, I think that as long as the reviewer gets his or her facts straight, the opinion part of the piece is not actionable, however negative it might be. An example:

Saying, "the steak arrived with maggots crawling all over it" when in fact it wasn't presented this way would be actionable.

Saying, "their steak was overdone and tasted like a piece of shoe leather" is not actionable, as it is expressing a personal opinion.

-Paul W.

I'm not competent to address your points, Paul.

But, in a general sense, the European Court of Human Rights ordered the UK government to pay the appellants 57,000 pounds, among other things, because of the complex and oppressive nature of the UK libel laws.

It is still to early to know whether legislative reform will be successful. But until the law is clarified, libel law in the UK remains a very difficult field to understand and interpret.

As one small example, note how careful UK solicitors are in discussing the import of the Belfast result:

Caroline Keane, a partner at the media law firm Wiggin LLP, said: "With most restaurant reviews you would argue that the whole review is a matter of honest opinion, given without malice - and you are entitled in law to have quite a vitriolic opinion, you don't have to express an opinion that most people would necessarily agree with."

In my experience, UK solicitors are willing to advance arguments that might prevail in litigation, but are rarely willing to summarize the law as a general matter.

And what would you make of a vitriolic review that contained one or more factual errors?

In the meantime, it's heartening that the European Court of Human Rights considered the UK's obligations under the Convention on freedom of speech.

Regards, Bob

the case was heard in Northern Ireland, not Eire

Ah, <i>colonized</i> Eire, then!

One day it might rise to the level of <i>civilized</i> Eire. But somehow I doubt it, too many Prods running amok!

It's not clear to me how anti-Protestant insults are any funnier than anti-Catholic insults. Perhaps you can enlighten me.

And without that settlement, civilization as we know it will not exist in Northern Ireland. The Protestants/Unionists/Loyalists have always had the power to stop the Troubles. Rightly or wrongly, they have never done so. .

And there I was thinking the murdering and bombing IRA were involved.

The New York Times has an interesting article on this case and the state of US law at the present time. Some extracts:

THE review, published last month in The Philadelphia Inquirer, was three sentences long. It praised the crab cake at Chops restaurant in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., but said the meal there over all “was expensive and disappointing, from the soggy and sour chopped salad to a miserably tough and fatty strip steak.”

The resulting libel lawsuit was 16 pages long. It did not dispute that the steak was lousy. Rather, it said that Craig LaBan, a restaurant critic for The Inquirer, “ate a steak sandwich without bread, not a strip steak, and therefore had, and has, no personal knowledge of the quality of the Chops strip steak.”

By comparing “a $15 steak sandwich to an upscale dinner strip steak,” the suit said, Mr. LaBan and The Inquirer libeled the restaurant, hurting its reputation and business.

The suit joins a long line of court encounters between sharp reviews and the restaurateurial ego, and, if the earlier cases are a reliable guide, it is doomed.

The article continues here. Free registraiton required.