Watch Out, CNN: President Trump's Supreme Court Frontrunner Is Bad News for Free Speech

President Donald Trump may go far in living up to his much-ridiculed pledge to open up libel laws to make it easier to sue media outlets. How? Turn no further than Abbas v. Foreign Policy Group, a 2014 decision at the US Appeals Court for the DC Circuit authored by recent Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh. At first blush, the decision looks like a win for libel defendants. In fact, when it came out, many reporters highlighted how Kavanaugh poured cold water on the notion that asking a question could be actionable as defamation by implication. (The plaintiff was the son of the Palestinian leader suing over the questions, “Are the sons of the Palestinian president growing rich off their father’s system?” and “Have they enriched themselves at the expense of regular Palestinians — and even U.S. taxpayers?”) But the bigger bombshell from Kavanaugh in Abbas was becoming the first appellate circuit anywhere in the nation to rule that anti-SLAPP analysis had no business in federal courts.  What’s “anti-SLAPP”? For those unfamiliar with the term, SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. Several dozen states have enacted anti-SLAPP laws to deter frivolous litigation aimed at activity protected by the First Amendment. As Kavanaugh notes in Abbas, anti-SLAPP statutes give more breathing space for free speech and try to decrease the "chilling effect" of speech-restrictive litigation. Having breathing room is important because even meritless lawsuits are expensive to defend. To avoid such costs, some might find it better to self-censor.