The Lawsuit Defense
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The lawsuit defense is a variation of the appeal to ignorance where it is claimed that something is true if no lawsuit claiming it is false has been filed:
Nan: You should read about all the celebrity scandals in this magazine.
Fran: I'm not going to waste my time on that garbage, most of it is just made up.
Nan: If it was made up the celebrities would sue. They writers cannot afford to make stuff up. It is all absolutely true.
(There are occasional lawsuits against the tabloids, but usually there aren't any.)
Here is another example, from an e-mail I got:
Hi Jim,
Many thanks and kudos on your site. I'm a regular reader. However, I do have one question. If the quote attributed to Charles Wurster is erroneous, then why has he not filed libel suits? Certainly there are some well-funded guilty targets out there and only a libel or slander suit would get the attention of the people making these claims. Obviously, without such a suit we'll be hearing this quote for the rest of our lives and Dr. Wurster's reputation will continue to be harmed. Please let me know if you have an answer. Otherwise, I don't see your debunking of this quote as being credible to those I might refer to your site.
Thanks,
Bill
The short answer is: if I am wrong why haven't the American Council of Health and Science sued me, or at least sent me a nasty letter from their lawyers? There longer answer is that there are a number of drawbacks to filing a lawsuit, and they are seldom worth the effort. (Here is one case where the threat of legal action did produce a correction.) The quote has been repeated many times, and it would be impossible to get them all corrected. Wurster would probably have to prove that the quote was made up, that the people repeating the quote should have known it was made up, and that using the quote caused him harm. Lawsuits can be drawn out affairs, and most people don't have the time and energy to invest in them. And to many people lawsuits are not the way to resolve differences.
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Written by Jim Norton
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