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policy but to refuse to honour foreign judgments when the basis for jurisdiction or substantive law of the foreign court is highly offensive to the American sense of justice. Just as the divorce cases were decided on a case-by-case basis, depending on the legitimacy of the Mexican jurisdiction, so should the defamation cases be individually resolved based on the totality of circumstances in each case. By thoughtfully employing the established rules of comity, it becomes clear that there are some foreign defamation decisions that should be enforced in the United States and there are others where the foreign courts’ actions are not worthy of recognition. Blanket rules precluding enforcement of non-US defamation judgments are as ill advised as rejecting all Mexican divorces.
Freedom of speech, the right to privacy and right to reputation all sound good to most of us. The challenge is that one person’s rights to privacy and reputation limit the freedom of speech of another. As free speech rights expand, our privacy and reputation rights necessarily decline. The challenge for a modern society is to strike the right balance. The twenty-first century presents a further challenge; with the continued growth of the internet and the inevitability of even more technological breakthroughs, communications envelope the world despite efforts to contain dissemination. Even in the mundane world of mail-order sales, the internet has changed the rules through global sales of books and recordings through web-based retailers like Amazon and eBay. A publisher cannot hope to limit circulation of publications to a single country and therein is the challenge. Each nation has developed its own balancing act among free speech, privacy, and reputation. It would be asking the impossible for a publisher to be assured of compliance with every single body of law unless the publisher chooses to comply with the most restrictive laws. This would clearly be unsatisfactory to citizens of democracies because to achieve this result, publishers would need to abide by the laws of such bastions of free speech as North Korea, Iran, or China. While this would surely avoid some litigation, the world would be decidedly poorer for such a choice.