The Ehrenfeld case made American publishers realise that an odd sale on Amazon or the transfusion of ideas via the internet to Britain, could wipe out their constitutional protections. They lobbied the US Congress to declare that English libel verdicts should be unenforceable in the United States — to rule, in other words, that as far America was concerned Britain, an ally whose jurisprudence has its roots in the English Common Law, was now a pariah state. Whatever legions of faults they possess, however often they have been on the receiving end of criticism from the press, American politicians responded. Congress Rory I. Lancman of the New York state legislature spoke with a plainness I long to hear from British politicians, and boomed, "When American journalists and authors can be hauled into kangaroo courts on phony-baloney libel charges in overseas jurisdictions who don't share our belief in freedom of speech or a free press, all of us are threatened."

The attention devoted to the plucky Ms Ehrenfeld's fight against Mr Justice Eady, and the condemnations from the US House of Representatives and the United Nations it produced, can sometimes miss the fact that pulping order he issued against Funding Evil was hardly a one-off. 

My incomplete files include the case of Roman Polanski, whom the Law Lords allowed to sue in London, even though he could not appear in person at the High Court because he had fled to France from America in 1978 to escape charges of having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl. The indulgent judges allowed a fugitive from child abuse allegations to escape the indignity of being arrested and deported by the British police and said he could deliver his evidence via a video link instead. (He duly won a wad of damages.) The courts then allowed the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov to sue the Kiev Post in London, even though it has barely 100 subscribers in Britain, and the Obozrevatel Ukrainian news site, which doesn't even publish in English. They did not intervene to stop the Icelandic bank Kaupthing suing the Danish paper Ekstra Bladet for alleging that it followed dubious practices — an allegation somewhat vindicated by the bank's subsequent crash. Meanwhile, the NGO Global Witness had to fight a libel threat after it published details of how the son of the president of the Congo was spending a fortune on luxury hotels and luxury goods. The president claimed it was "racist" for Global Witness to reproduce his son's lavish credit card bills on its website, and although it won, it had to divert effort and resources to combating lawyers rather than fighting poverty.

There has been far too little opposition to a legal establishment, which is besmirching Britain's good name in the world because the British media is hopelessly divided. "Serious" newspapers complain about libel law but not about the judge-made law of privacy because that only seems to hurt the proles on the tabloids, whose interest in the sex lives of the rich and famous the high-minded affect to deplore. I suspect they will soon begin to regret their silence. Increasingly, the judges are using privacy law to stop traditional investigative journalism.

For instance, a newspaper I cannot name found that the chief executive of a company I cannot name, in a sector of the economy I cannot name either because it might identify the company I cannot name and thus the chief executive I cannot name, had had affairs with three members of his staff. As the company ran into financial difficulties, the paper thought that its investors and employees had the right to know that the boss was pursuing his subordinates — itself a disciplinary offence in many firms — rather than running his business. On no account could it publish. Even though Bill Clinton faced impeachment hearings for less, privacy law covered the chief executive's affairs in the office.