Welcome to Episode 3 of The Libertarian. I am Charles C.W. Cook, here as always, with Richard Epstein, and this is a production of the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas

at Austin. Richard, welcome to your own show. Oh, it's always nice to be in my own show.

So this week, we are going to discuss a defamation suit, which you have described as explosive.

In fact, you use a lot of superlatives in your piece on this at Civitas.

This defamation case in particular would involve a photograph that was published by the New York

Times and others that purports to show a Gerson child starving as the result of Israeli actions,

but did not in fact show that. And so the question we have is whether or not Israel and maybe others will be able to sue

the New York Times and other outlets for deliberately misleading the public and damaging

their reputations.

Maybe you should start by introducing to us what this case is about who the parties are and what is

at stake. Okay, well, the first thing we don't even know is exactly who the parties are.

It turns out that the Israeli government probably is an entity capable of suing, but there are

always problems when sovereign sues. But it's also clear that the

statement about what went on here is a direct attack on major officials inside the Israeli government

and so forth, and they could bring suits as persons. It does not matter if they are named as such.

What matters in effect in all these cases is whether you can make a reasonable inference that

they are people who are subject to the criticism. And I think the leadership of the Israeli government

will do that. The defendants, that's also a tricky question. It turns out the New York Times

is clearly going to be one, but the photographer who made the particular picture may well be involved in this particular

situation. And there may be some high-level officials that made some critical kinds of decisions

about, for example, how to post the position, whether or not to retract and so forth, may be sued

in these cases. And one of the things that one always realizes is that a defamation case has an initial stage,

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