Here is a story you will never read: a small newspaper in a county you have never heard of spent four months on the finances of a local waste company, had the documents, had the lawyer's sign-off — and killed it in week fifteen, because the company's lawyers had already sent two letters and the paper's insurer did the arithmetic. * Nobody censored anything. No judge banned the story. There was no ruling, no verdict, no villain in a robe. There was a cost estimate, and the cost estimate won. * That is what a SLAPP does, and it does it best when it never gets to court at all. * ### The definition, and the part everyone misses * **SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation: a lawsuit filed not to win, but to make speaking expensive.** * The acronym was coined in the 1980s by two University of Denver professors, **George Pring** (law) and **Penelope Canan** (sociology), who launched the Political Litigation Project in **1984** after noticing a pattern — ordinary people were being sued for testifying at zoning hearings, signing petitions, writing letters to officials. Their book, *SLAPPs: Getting Sued for Speaking Out* (Temple University Press), gave the thing a name, and naming it is most of why anti-SLAPP laws exist today. * The part people miss: **the plaintiff losing is not a failure of the strategy. It is often the plan.** A defamation claim that has no chance of surviving trial can still cost the defendant two years, a six-figure legal bill, and a discovery process that hoovers up their emails, their sources, and their nerve. If the target settles, apologizes, or quietly takes the story down at month nine, the case never reaches the judge who would have thrown it out — and the filer got exactly what they paid for. * So the honest test of a SLAPP is not "is this claim weak." It's **"does the process itself deliver the punishment."** * ### What an anti-SLAPP law actually does * Anti-SLAPP statutes are not free-speech poetry. They are three plumbing fixes, and each one attacks a different part of the cost problem. * **1. An early exit.** The defendant files a special motion to strike or dismiss, and the court decides up front whether the suit targets protected speech on a matter of public concern — before a trial, sometimes within weeks. California's statute, **Code of Civil Procedure § 425.16**, enacted in **1992**, is the version most other states borrowed from. * **2. A discovery freeze.** While the motion is pending, discovery usually stops. This matters more than it sounds: discovery is the expensive part, and for a reporter it is also the dangerous part, because that's where a plaintiff goes fishing for unpublished notes and source identities. * **3. Fee-shifting.** If the motion succeeds, the plaintiff pays the defendant's legal fees. This is the only provision that changes anyone's behaviour before a suit is filed, because it converts "sue them, it's cheap for me and ruinous for them" into a real risk. * A statute with the first two and not the third is a speed bump. The fee provision is the part with teeth. * ### The map: 40 states, and the ones without * **40 states and the District of Columbia now have an anti-SLAPP law of some kind**, per the Institute for Free Speech's 2025 report card and the Public Participation Project's state tracker. The coverage is real and it is growing. * The growth is mostly one document. In **2020** the Uniform Law Commission published the **Uniform Public Expression Protection Act (UPEPA)** — an off-the-shelf strong anti-SLAPP statute states can adopt nearly verbatim, with the early motion, the discovery stay, the fee award, and an immediate right to appeal. Adoption has been steady: **Michigan** became the fifteenth UPEPA state in **October 2025**, **South Dakota** the sixteenth in **March 2026**, and **Missouri** the seventeenth in **July 2026**. * Which leaves the other ten states, and this is where the map stops being trivia. **North Dakota has no anti-SLAPP law.** Remember that for four paragraphs. * ### There is no federal anti-SLAPP law, and that is not a technicality * Congress has never passed one. Bills keep appearing — Representative **Jamie Raskin** introduced a federal anti-SLAPP statute in **September 2022** — and they keep dying. * The consequence is a genuine mess: federal appeals courts disagree about whether a *state* anti-SLAPP law even applies when a case lands in federal court. The **D.C. Circuit** said no in **Abbas v. Foreign Policy Group (2015)**, reasoning that Federal Rules 12 and 56 already answer the same question. The **Eleventh Circuit** agreed in **Carbone v. Cable News Network (2018)**, holding Georgia's motion-to-strike procedure doesn't travel into federal court. The **Ninth Circuit** has long held the opposite. * Read that as a practical instruction, because that is how litigators read it: **the same speech, the same plaintiff, the same claim can be protected in one courthouse and unprotected in another one across the street.** Forum shopping isn't an abuse of this system. It is a feature any competent plaintiff's lawyer is paid to exploit. * ### The case that shows the whole machine: Energy Transfer v. Greenpeace * Filed in **North Dakota** — the state with no anti-SLAPP law — over the Dakota Access Pipeline protests of 2016–17. * In **March 2025**, a North Dakota jury found against Greenpeace and awarded the pipeline company roughly **$667 million**. In **October 2025**, Judge James Gion cut the award to **$345 million**, striking several claims including trespass, conversion, and defamation per se as duplicative. The judgment was finalized on **February 27, 2026**. Greenpeace has moved for a new trial — arguing in **April 2026** that the local jury pool was biased — and has said it will appeal to the North Dakota Supreme Court. * Every number there is under appeal and may change. What is already settled is the structural point: **in a state with a working anti-SLAPP statute, the defendant would have had a shot at an early motion and a discovery freeze before any of that.** In North Dakota there was no such door to knock on. The case went the long way, and the long way is the expensive way. * The counter-move is the interesting bit. Greenpeace International has gone after Energy Transfer in **the Netherlands**, under the **EU's anti-SLAPP directive** — and in June 2026 a North Dakota court refused the pipeline developers' request for an injunction to stop it. An American environmental group is using a European law to sue over an American lawsuit. That is what an absent federal statute looks like from the outside. * ### Europe: a law named after a dead journalist, and a deadline nearly everyone missed * The EU directive has an unofficial name — **"Daphne's Law"** — used by the European Commission when it launched the initiative in **April 2022**. It's for **Daphne Caruana Galizia**, the Maltese investigative journalist murdered by a car bomb on **16 October 2017**. When she was killed she had **48 libel actions pending against her**. * Not one of those suits killed her. That's the point of the name. The suits were the ordinary, legal, boring pressure — the thing that was supposed to work first. * The directive set a transposition deadline of **7 May 2026** for member states to put it into national law. Nearly all of them missed it, according to press-freedom monitors including the Media Freedom Rapid Response and the European Federation of Journalists, and in **July 2026** the Commission opened infringement action against **14 member states** over the delay. * A law against lawsuits is still just a law. It only works when someone enforces the calendar. * ### How to spot one in a story you're reading * You will rarely see "SLAPP" in the article. Here is what shows up instead. * **A mismatch of size.** A company or public figure with real money suing an individual, a blogger, a small nonprofit, or a local outlet. The imbalance is the mechanism, not a detail. * **The speech was public participation.** A review, a protest, testimony at a hearing, a complaint to a regulator, a social post about a landlord. SLAPPs land on people who spoke *to* the public or *to* the government, which is exactly the category anti-SLAPP statutes were built to cover. * **Damages that don't match the harm.** A number with too many zeros for a blog post read by four hundred people. The figure isn't a valuation; it's a message. * **Claims stacked sideways.** Defamation plus tortious interference plus conspiracy plus trespass. Piling on isn't strength — it's an attempt to find one claim that survives the early motion, since a surviving claim keeps discovery alive. * **The quiet ending.** The story is deleted, the account goes silent, the outlet runs a strange one-line "clarification," and nobody explains why. Most SLAPPs end here, invisibly, which is why the ones you read about are the unrepresentative survivors. * ### What this changes about reading the news * It should change what you count as coverage. **The stories that get told about the powerful are filtered through who can afford to be sued** — and that filter runs before the story exists, in a conversation between an editor, a lawyer, and an insurer that no reader ever sees. * When a small outlet breaks something big about a rich company, it is not just doing journalism. It is accepting a bill it may not be able to pay. When a big outlet doesn't, the reason is sometimes cowardice, sometimes ownership, and sometimes an actuarial table. * And when a story about a powerful local company quietly disappears from a site with no correction and no note, that absence is information. It's just not filed anywhere you can look it up. * Anti-SLAPP laws exist because Pring and Canan noticed that the people getting sued were mostly not journalists at all — they were neighbours who showed up at a hearing. That's still true. The reporter is the visible case. The person who decides not to complain about their landlord is the actual scale of it.