This is a curious and fascinating book. It is fascinating because it is jam-packed with details about the great, the good, and the not-so-good which will have lawyers and journalists alike turning the pages at fever pitch, and is peppered with judiciously under-stated and lawyerly jokes (the author's email address is "SooperHooper"). It is curious because, just as the reader's gorge is rising in righteous indignation at the cowboy antics of bounty-hunters like Jeffrey Archer - by no means the worst of them, except for people who may have forgotten Robert Maxwell - he is forced to read through some examples of the sort of journalism for which, presumably, the horsewhip was invented.
Indeed, one of the surprising conclusions from reading this book is that there are still all too many media prepared to print or broadcast, and subsequently defend in court, the type of material to which the only appropriate response is a fairly large sum of media money. Another is that, at the other end of the scale, there are plenty of bullies, frauds and touts who, with the help of eager lawyers, can make decent, honest journalism look like something the cat brought in and can persuade juries to gleefully distribute large amounts of other people's cash to undeserving causes.
In between is where the problems lie. Time and time again, the reported cases reveal the exceptional bluntness of the law of libel when used as an instrument to distinguish right from wrong, fair comment from unjustified slur. There always has to be one winner when sometimes there ought to be two losers. And yet one of the underlying themes of the book is that, given the present state of the libel laws in Britain, there is a sense in which almost everyone ends up a loser. Numbers of reputations are shredded along the way - not all of them plaintiffs or defendants. Lawyers who give bad libel advice (including some of the most famous) are not spared. Nor is the judge in Albert Reynolds's libel case against the Sunday Times, whose summing up is described as "wholly inept".
Irish readers will be particularly interested in Hooper's assessment of this case. Reynolds, he says, "bizarrely, effectively lost on the facts of the case but should have won, while the press, which should have won on the legal issues, in fact lost". As the case is still ongoing, his further judgement is even more interesting: the case, he suggests, "significantly changed the balance in favour of freedom of speech and will make the bringing of libel actions by politicians more perilous".
When we unpick this, we find it based on his contention that the Court of Appeal to all intents and purposes accepted the Sun- day Times's contention that their reporting of Reynolds's actions was covered by the defence of qualified privilege, but found against the paper because of its failure to act reasonably. If this is true, it is certainly the case that British case law is clearly moving in the direction of Sullivan v the New York Times, which held that public figures had to prove that the defendants knew what they published was untrue, or were reckless in publishing it.
They will not, however, go all the way; not just because English judges do not like to be led by the noses by their US counterparts (although this is undoubtedly true), but because the Reynolds case turned in part on European law - the Convention of Human Rights - and on a series of sophisticated judgments in other European countries which offer a more nuanced way of looking at the problem. This is why the Reynolds case, despite the fact that it is being heard in London, will also have a relevance for Irish practice.
The latter part of the book contains a cogent analysis of the ways in which the 1996 attempt to reform the libel laws in Britain, undertaken with the best of intentions, has in some cases made things worse rather than better. It should be read - and soon - by anyone currently in government who is thinking of picking up the worthy ideas on this topic which have been gathering dust since they were published initially by the Law Reform Commission (under the new Chief Justice) and later embellished by the Commission on the Newspaper Industry. We live in hope.
John Horgan teaches journalism at Dublin City University