If you’re an author confronted with a negative book review, you have several options. You can write an angry letter to the editor. You can complain to friends and family about the reviewer’s lack of discernment. You can decide that bad publicity is better than no publicity at all and let the book speak for itself (often the wisest course, in my experience as a book-review editor).
What you don’t do is sue the editor of the newspaper or journal that published the review.
So it came as a shock to journal editors to learn that one of their own, Joseph H.H. Weiler, editor of the European Journal of International Law, would face a criminal-libel lawsuit in France over a review that he published on a Web site that he also edits, one that posts reviews of scholarly books.
Although the case, set for trial in June, is so unusual that it seems unlikely to set a precedent that would seriously dampen academic reviewers’ freedom of critique, that possibility still has editors worried. And it has left observers scratching their heads over why a scholar would choose to dispute a review in court and not in the usual arenas of academic debate.
First the details. The plaintiff is Karin N. Calvo-Goller, a lawyer and senior lecturer at the Academic Center of Law & Business, a college in Israel. The defendant, Mr. Weiler, is a professor of law at New York University. In addition to editing EJIL, he runs the Global Law Books Web site, which in spring 2006 published a short review of Ms. Calvo-Goller’s book The Trial Proceedings of the International Criminal Court (Martinus Nijhoff). The reviewer was Thomas Weigend, a professor of law at the University of Cologne and director of the Cologne Institute of Foreign and International Criminal Law.
Ms. Calvo-Goller has not made any public statements about the case, nor has she has responded to my requests for comment, so we have to rely on Mr. Weiler’s account of what happened.
In an editorial in the law journal, he reprints a long exchange of letters with Ms. Calvo-Goller, in which she asked him to remove Mr. Weigend’s review from the Web site. “The review is defamatory for my reputation, information contained in the review is false,” she wrote.
Mr. Weiler declined to remove the review, arguing that it was not libelous, and offering her the chance to write a comment that could be posted on the Web site alongside the review. She again asked him to take down the review; he again declined. In 2008 he received a subpoena to appear in court. (The exchange doesn’t explain why Ms. Calvo-Goller brought the suit in France, but she does note that the European Union’s standards of freedom of expression are not as broad as those in the United States.) Mr. Weigend, the reviewer, was not subpoenaed.
“I very much hope that we will prevail before the Criminal Tribunal of Paris,” Mr. Wieler writes in his editorial. “Any other result will deal a heavy blow to academic freedom and change the landscape of book reviewing in scholarly journals, especially when reviews have a cyber presence as is so common today.”.
The review is still available online, so you can read it—all four paragraphs of it—and judge for yourself. Mr. Weigend was unenthusiastic about Ms. Calvo-Goller’s book. But I can think of many harsher book reviews. Remember Dale Peck’s observation, in a 2002 review in The New Republic, that “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation”?
“It’s the kind of mildly critical book review you would see in any academic journal,” says Kevin Jon Heller, a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne’s law school. “That’s what shocked me the most.” Mr. Heller made his feelings about the case clear in a post on the Opinio Juris blog headlined “Criminal Libel for Publishing a Critical Book Review? Seriously?”
As the book-review editor of the New Criminal Law Review from 2007 to 2009, Mr. Heller had his share of dealings with aggrieved authors. But he says he has never heard of a case like this one. “I don’t think, for 99 percent of the legal academy, it would ever cross their minds to do this. It’s just so fundamentally antithetical to the academic project. Everybody I’ve spoken to is just shocked and horrified.”
Freedom of Critique
I got in touch with Lori Fisler Damrosch and Bernard H. Oxman, editors in chief of the American Journal of International Law. Ms. Damrosch is a professor of law and international organization at Columbia Law School. Mr. Oxman is a professor at the University of Miami’s law school. They have heard worries from the journal’s board of editors over what the Weiler case might mean for academic freedom and the scholarly exchange of ideas. Ms. Damrosch said the case also raises “an area of new concern"—the possibility that a review published online could vanish altogether if an angry author succeeds in having it removed. “We haven’t had to confront those questions before,” she told me. Now “there are impermanent as well as permanent forms of these publications.”
Ms. Damrosch and Mr. Oxman shared two statements about the case being circulated by the executive boards of the European Society of International Law and the French Society for International Law. “The board is convinced that the book review which is the subject of this lawsuit is well within the scope of regular academic discourse,” the European society said. “The board wishes to underline that critique is the essence of scholarship, and is indeed a necessary feature of the work of academics and scholars.”
It’s not clear how likely Ms. Calvo-Goller is to prevail in court. I asked François H. Briard, a lawyer who tries cases in France’s Supreme Court, to give me a sense of how the French legal system treats such cases. “Usually there is no libel between academics,” Mr. Briard told me via e-mail, “unless there is true insult.” But “the courts are quite protective of honor and reputation. If real harm is done, I mean quite a high level of bad appreciation [negative comment] on the person, the only way for the writer not to be convicted is to plead 1) I did this with entire good faith, for example relying on public facts or wrong information; 2) the appreciation made relies on true facts.”
The journal editors I spoke with were optimistic that the case will be dismissed once a judge reviews the facts. But Ms. Damrosch pointed out that whatever the outcome, Mr. Weiler still faces the financial and psychological wear and tear of a court proceeding—not a pleasant prospect.
In the court of scholarly opinion, at least, Ms. Calvo-Goller appears to be losing. Scholars in the blogosphere have been weighing in on Mr. Weiler’s side. “The author has obviously done more damage to her own reputation by making this criminal complaint than would have been possible by any book review, let alone the one in question,” Brian Leiter wrote on his popular blog, Leiter Reports, in February. He is a professor of law and director of the center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values at the University of Chicago.
What does Mr. Weigend, the author of the review at stake, make of all this? He seems as taken aback as anyone, saying he cannot add much to what Mr. Weiler has already made public. “In particular, I have never had any personal connection whatsoever to Ms. Calvo-Goller,” Mr. Weigend told me via e-mail. “I have been much surprised by the legal action she has brought in France and have no idea what the possible outcome may be.”
