Today some of the country’s largest advocacy groups, including the First Amendment Coalition, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, PETA, Earthrights International, and the ACLU of Northern California, asked the California Supreme Court to review a decision from the California Court of Appeal that threatens to devastate political association rights in the state.
The lower court’s decision held that when someone else does something illegal as part of a protest or social justice movement, the target of that movement can sue everyone involved in the movement – not just the wrongdoer – and evade California’s anti-SLAPP law by pleading no facts about everyone else’s liability.
This is how the lower court’s rule would work in practice: take a Black Lives Matter march down that 100 people attend. Someone spraypaints a shop window. The shop owner then sued all 100 people, BLM the organization, and the newspaper. The plaintiff details everything each person did — they marched, they organized, they chanted. And the plaintiff has a boilerplate allegation of a bunch of different vicarious liability theories, pleaded on information and belief and unsupported by any facts. Under the First District’s rules, the defendants would have no recourse to California’s law designed to weed out exactly these kinds of lawsuits.
The advocacy groups warn the Supreme Court that the “ruling exposes anyone who organizes, attends, or reports on a protest to the threat and burden of defending meritless litigation. Left unreviewed, the Court of Appeal’s decision would make a mockery of the central purpose of the anti-SLAPP statute: screening out meritless claims that arise from protected activity, before the defendant is required to undergo the expense and intrusion of discovery.”