The case of the day is In re Gliner (9th Cir. 2025). Gregory Gliner was married to Veronica Bourlakova, the daughter of Russian businessman Oleg Bourlakov. After Burlakov died, there was a dispute about whether Veronica was entitled to inherit. The dispute led, Gliner claimed, to an article published pseudonymously on politicallore.com, accusing Gliner of embezzlement and theft. Gliner claimed that the defamatory statements were false and intended as part of a campaign to disparage him and his family because of the inheritance dispute. He planned to bring a defamation lawsuit in the UK, where he lived. In order to identify the operator of the website, he brought a 1782 application seeking evidence from the domain name registrar, Dynadot, which was located in California.

The district court denied Gliner’s ex parte application on the grounds that the First Amendment protects the right of anonymous speech. “Gliner’s application,” the judge wrote, “does not address why disclosure of the website operator and author’s identities would be justified or appropriate in light of their First Amendment interests.” Gliner appealed.

The Ninth Circuit held that the lower court had abused its discretion. After giving a delivering a paean to anonymous speech in American political history—The Federalist Papers and so forth—and asserting that the First Amendment protects the right to anonymous speech, the court noted that the website operator and the author might not by US citizens and might not be located in the United States. Thus “the First Amendment may not protect the Operator or the Author at all,” because “foreign citizens outside U.S. territory do not possess rights under the U.S. Constitution, including those under the First Amendment.” Nor, the court thought, was there sufficient reason to think that the website was aimed at readers in the United States, who might have their own First Amendment interest in reading it.

But the court left the door open to considering the First Amendment issue later, because it held that the district court would have to give notice to the author and the website operator if it decided to issue the subpoena on remand. They could then assert a First Amendment issue if they wished in seeking to quash the subpoenas.

We know from Intel that one of the factors a court should consider when judging a 1782 application is circumvention. Usually that refers to circumvention of foreign proof-gathering restrictions, but Intel says that it can also mean circumvention of important foreign or US policies. So it is conceivable that a court would reason that US public policy on anonymous speech counsels against granting a 1782 application in a foreign defamation case, especially in light of the SPEECH Act, the federal statute barring recognition of foreign defamation judgments when the foreign law does not provide protection for speech equivalent to the First Amendment.

But I don’t find that approach really persuasive. It may be that our public policy does not permit recognition of a foreign defamation judgment here if the foreign law is not sufficiently protective of speech. But we don’t have an expectation that foreign states should conform their law on defamation to our law. In other words, we don’t think that it is wrong from the UK to have a different view of defamation than we do. So while it makes sense to consider whether First Amendment concerns should bar a 1782 application, I don’t think they should, as a general matter.

Note that not all issues are like this. There are some issues where we do expect foreign states to have a law that matches ours. The best example I know of is in the law of child support. Without getting into too much detail, our law on recognition and enforcement of child support orders, called UIFSA, allows for registration of orders from states where the Hague Child Support Convention is in force with respect to the United States; states that either the US or the US state in question has another reciprocity arrangement, or states that have adopted a law substantially similar to UIFSA. But the law refuses to allow registration if the foreign court lacked personal jurisdiction over the respondent, and the courts measure the foreign court’s jurisdiction using the standards of due process. All of this together means that from a US perspective, there is or ought to be an integrated and cooperative international child support system, where we expect the basic law abroad to mirror our own. In contexts like that, I think the piece of the circumvention factor that addresses US policies rightly comes to the fore.