This chapter examines the relationship between English satire and libel law between roughly 1670 and 1730. It takes up the growth of verbal ambiguity and the use of irony, circumlocution, and allegory among satirists such as John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Delarivier Manley, and demonstrates how the courts responded to verbal ambiguity by refining the supposedly “objective” interpretive standards to be used by jurors. Such standards created mechanisms for delimiting verbal ambiguity and restricting the interpretive latitude of jurors while permitting the crown to skirt technical linguistic issues. These revisions to the law were part of a more general refinement of libel laws, which furnished the government with its primary means of regulating the press during this period. The interaction between libel law and satire had consequences for both legal procedure and literature – consequences that extended well beyond the eighteenth century and that continue to shape legal and literary practice today.

This chapter introduces the framework for the comparison between Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, the factors individuals confronted when they decided what type of proceeding to take over expression they disliked, the conceptual transition from the law concerning libels to libel law, the development of the defenses of privilege and truth, the emergence of the idea that obscene texts could be prosecuted as criminal libels, and the establishment of the courtroom as the site where individual claims to freedom of speech and conscience were brought in Massachusetts – but not Nova Scotia – against a backdrop of majoritarian violence.

The losing side in Goldwater v. Ginzburg appealed, then asked the Supreme Court to review the appeals court verdict. The decision to file writ of certiorari (a formal request for the Court to review the case) was not an empty exercise. In the wake of New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), no one knew exactly how the new doctrine of libel – “actual malice” – would be applied or what its limits might be. This chapter looks at how the Supreme Court viewed Ralph Ginzburg and Fact magazine and shows how at least some of the justices reasoned about hearing the case. I trace Ginburg’s hope that he could loosen libel law at the highest level and Goldwater’s hope that he could protect future public figures from libel even under the dramatically loosened standard represented by Sullivan. The Court’s decision was the occasion for some of Justice Hugo Black’s most eloquent words. As I show, throughout the process the media and Goldwater’s supporters took a keen interest in the outcome, just as Goldwater had hoped.