Like any blogger who covers developments in the case law, I sometimes cover cases involving persons or companies accused of unsavory things. Yesterday I received a comment from a reader who said that he was the victim of one of the alleged fraudsters I’ve written about. The comment didn’t have to do with the substance of the post, but rather with the underlying crimes or torts the party to the case was accused of.

I am not going to publish the comment, and in the interests of openness, I want to explain to readers my general editorial policy. I want to keep Letters Blogatory focused on issues of judicial assistance. If I think that a comment is not sufficiently related to the subject matter of the blog, I will not publish it. If I think that a comment is uncivil, I will not publish it. However, I will publish comments that are related to the subject matter of the blog as long as they are civil, no matter how critical of my views or posts they are.

I am quite confident that I could publish the comment without fear of liability under US law. I think that Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act, as construed in Universal Communications Systems, Inc. v. Lycos, Inc., 478 F.3d 418 (1st Cir. 2007), clearly applies in this situation, and of course, the SPEECH Act would bar recognition and enforcement of any foreign judgment here in the US. So this is not a concern about legal exposure, it’s merely an editorial judgment.