I’m not asking for legal advice. This is purely hypothetical.
I’m a Canadian citizen. Suppose there is a US citizens named Bloggins.
I don’t like Bloggins. I think Bloggins is a big jerk.
I post on social media some things that are libelous about Bloggins, e.g. that he routinely commits aggravated mopery with the intent to defame him and knowing it isn’t true.
What recourse does Bloggins have?
Can he sue me? If so would he have to sue me in Canada? If he can sue me in the USA and chooses to do so and I say “Pfft. Whatever.” and choose not to show up, I assume a default judgement would be placed against me, but so what?
Again, I want to be clear. This is purely hypothetical based on a Facebook post that didn’t involve me at all (basically somebody threatening to sue somebody else and the other person responding they live in Canada so neener neener).
It used to be that there were fairly strong barriers to the enforcement of foreign judgments, a hold-over from when courts of one country didn’t really trust courts in other countries to be fair to foreigners. When people from Country A were sued in the courts of Country B, lawyers in Country A often advised their clients not to respond to the suit in Country B. Instead, the advice was often to fight it in the courts of Country A if the other side tried to enforce the decision from the courts of Country B in the courts of Country A.
That has steadily changed over the past few decades, both with the enactment of international treaties to make it easier to enforce foreign judgments, and with changed attitudes by the judges, as the world gets increasingly more tightly linked.
In Canada, the leading case on it is Beals v. Saldana: an $8,000 Florida land deal went sour. The Florida purchaser of the land sued the vendors, who lived in Ontario, bringing their action in the Florida courts.
The Ontario lawyer advised his Ontario clients not to defend it in the Florida courts. That eventually led to a default Florida jury decision of $210,000 in compensatory damages, plus $50,000 in punitive damages.
The Supreme Court of Canada held that the Florida court decision could be enforced in Canadian courts.
This summary is not meant as legal advice, of course: just commenting on your hypothetical. Anyone who is being sued in the courts of a foreign country should seek legal advice about how best to respond.
That’s becoming an increasingly difficult question to answer with the internet. It used to be that the test was where a newspaper or book was mainly sold. But now a “newspaper” is available world-wide.
So can a Canadian who says something nasty about an American now be sued by the American in Kazakhstan, because a Kazakh read it on the web there?
I’m not up on libel and slander laws to know how courts deal with those kinds of issues.
Libel tourism of this kind, between parties who have little, if any, connection with this country, has become a topic of some concern here in recent years, and the Defamation Act 2013 attempted to address it.
Of course two parties to a commercial contract may bind themselves to accept the arbitration of the English courts and this is commonly done even by parties with little other connection to England, given the reputation for incorruptibility of the legal system here.