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Seditious libel is a criminal offence under common law of printing written material with seditious purpose – that is, the purpose of bringing contempt upon a political authority. It remains an offence in Canada but has been abolished in England and Wales .
The trial of Thomas Paine for seditious libel was held on 18 December 1792 in response to his publication of the second part of the Rights of Man. The government of William Pitt, worried by the possibility that the French Revolution might spread to England, had begun suppressing works that espoused radical philosophies.
The Case of the Dean of St Asaph, formally R v Shipley, was the 1784 trial of William Davies Shipley, the Dean of St Asaph, for seditious libel.In the aftermath of the American War of Independence, electoral reform had become a substantial issue, and William Pitt the Younger attempted to bring a Bill before Parliament to reform the electoral system.
The crime of seditious libel was presumed to persist, although last prosecuted in 1901. [39] [40] After the common law offence of blasphemous libel was ruled in 1999 to be incompatible with the constitution's guarantee of freedom of speech, jurists argued that seditious libel was similarly unconstitutional.
Libel Trial of Joseph Howe, Supreme Court (current Legislative Library), Province House (Nova Scotia) by Louis-Philippe Hébert. The Libel trial of Joseph Howe was a court case heard 2 March 1835 in which newspaper editor Joseph Howe was charged with seditious libel by civic politicians in Nova Scotia.
Criminal libel is a legal term, of English origin, which may be used with one of two distinct meanings, in those common law jurisdictions where it is still used.. It is an alternative name for the common law offence which is also known (in order to distinguish it from other offences of libel) as "defamatory libel" [1] or, occasionally, as "criminal defamatory libel".
The libel suit accused the Times of "uncritically advancing Lively's unsubstantiated claims of sexual harassment against Heath and Baldoni." The Times story said, for example, that Heath had shown ...
An early example of libel is the case of John Peter Zenger in 1735. Zenger was hired to publish the New York Weekly Journal. When he printed another man's article criticising William Cosby, the royal governor of Colonial New York, Zenger was accused of seditious libel. [28]