I have been following with great interest the apparently one-sided debate on how little English libel law should impinge on reasonable, skeptical discourse. I say one-sided because I seem to only read opinions with which I agree. There is something curiously circular about a debate in which the other party refuses to engage because it has decided to attack in court instead, precisely on the subject of the right to debate and to request a public display of evidence outside of court. McDonald’s provided an earlier example of this kind of ill-advised public image management .

Malicious statements are recognizable – and yet, how do you quantify malice? A good reputation is obvious – look at the goodwill we have toward our top scientific journals. But how do you quantify “reputation”? How do you assign a number proportional to the loss of reputation? Scratch that, I don’t really want to know, especially not up close.

The famous (now to me!) lawyer-blogger Jack of Kent has been writing about the current egregious example of how these libel laws are used and abused for a little more than a year, now. He has recently posted a distillation of some of the comments about how libel laws have no place in legitimate scientific discourse. You can see for yourself where people have made comments as well, here:

Written yesterday evening:

We inched our way between the south of Paris and Orly airport. My far too voluble driver, between counting his money and emitting complimentary platitudes about Obama’s recent address to Arab-speaking peoples while scrutinizing me in the rear-view mirror, was hardly looking at the road as he gently swerved in the lane and he endeavored to provide me with the excuse I needed at the Easyjet counter.

“My taxi driver had a road accident! I missed my plane because of the constat amiable! Help!”

This being France, and my having run in with the intransigence of Easyjet personnel over the size of a regularly carried carry-on, I was already playing the scenes in my head. And sweating.

Could I claim this taxi on my lab expenses? (Yes, I was late because of a meeting that my lab head absolutely wanted me to have with a friendly almost-competitor at the nearby Pasteur Institute.) What about the coach ride back in the morning? (I had bought a round-trip coming in.) Would I even need to ride back? Would I have to make it to – which train station was it again? – and take the overnight train down south to Toulouse (I get motion sickness in that train), or would it be the five-hour express tomorrow morning? How could I cancel my 9 a.m. doctor’s appointment? Or the fellow coming in the early afternoon to fix the hot water pump? How much pleading, crying and pumping of adrenalin would I have to expend to leave Orly again by foot, hangdog?

The meeting was well worth it, though, so I hoped to recover the additional one-way airplane ticket I was convinced I would have to buy. We were visiting a senior developmental biologist (SDB) at the Institut Pasteur, who had been head of the hiring commission during my first attempts to break into the full-time national research organizations here, and who at one point informed me gently that, given the hospital affiliation of my postdoc lab, I was wasting my time trying to obtain a CNRS spot. She was quite right, of course. We hadn’t crossed paths much since then, although a Ph.D. student of hers is a cardiologist at our hospital, with whom my Ph.D. student is now remotely collaborating.

Said student and I had the extremely gratifying experience of being courted for an appointment, and of it being made around my availability in Paris, even though it was in the first hour after SDB had made it back from New York, and she must have been feeling the effects. Even more gratifying was the discussion of our mutual results – unreserved, unsuspicious of revealing state secrets, and we all found out that the results were mutually inclusive. And yet more gratifying was to discover that student and I were much closer to submitting for publication than SDB, and that SDB found our results clean and elegant and suitable for the journal to which we will submit them. Thanks!!

When I finally arrived at Orly, there was a massive line at the check-in counters. As I joined the queue of the queue, the man ahead of me was pinpointed for advancing with his two proposed carry-ons, and he had a long “conversation” with the woman occupying the bouncer position at the beginning of the funnel. I stepped up, and explained that I had missed my plane. No tremors in the voice, nor tears in my eyes. I was proud.

“Go to the Easyjet counter in front of exit H,” quoth she, and turned to other confrontations.

I dutifully trudged down the entire length of the terminal to discover, of course, there was no such counter at exit H, but rather that I had walked right by it at exit E. I did get a little sniffly on the way back up.

The woman at the counter was perfectly charming, and informed me that for a fifty euros penalty I could get on the next flight – which was not immediately, but a couple of hours hence.

I was so grateful and surprised, that I teared up a little again (!). The agent informed me that it was the first time in her experience that a passenger had thanked her for shelling out extra money. Everyone parted in smiles.

When I made it upstairs to the departure level, I bought myself a 1664 (no real link, because it’s sort of the French Bud) and started some work on the computer that I would not have accomplished in lab, anyhow. Although the plane is delayed a half-hour due to technical troubles, all is right with the world.