Texas Free Speech Lawyer Takes Lessons From Depp Case to Europe

Laura Prather wants to bring Texas-style free speech protection to Europe.

Prather, a First Amendment lawyer in Austin, Texas, is headed to Europe on a Fulbright scholarship to study how meritless lawsuits meant to silence critics have impacted human rights. She also plans to push European Union countries to adopt protections against those suits, like “anti-SLAPP” laws in Texas and other US states.

“Much of my career has been trying to remedy the use of the judicial system to harass, punish and silence those who speak truth to power,” Prather said in an interview.

Prather, a partner at Haynes and Boone, has defended the New York Times Co., KTRK Television, Inc., and Spotify USA, Inc. in free speech and other cases. She’s best known for her work getting the Texas anti-SLAPP law on the books in 2011 and rallying a coalition to save the law when it was threatened eight years later.

The law—and those in 32 other states—is generally meant to protect media outlets, domestic abuse accusers and others from being silenced by expensive and flimsy lawsuits. As actor Johnny Depp’s recent $15 million case against ex-wife Amber Heard shows, the laws’ protections vary widely from state to state.

Prather heads to Europe amid a rise there in lawsuits meant to intimidate media, she said, including suits by Russian oligarchs against journalists in the United Kingdom.

SLAPP Spotlight

Anti-SLAPP—"strategic lawsuits against public participation"—laws recently got a turn in the spotlight in the Depp-Heard case.

Depp’s lawyers filed the suit in Virginia, although neither actor lives in the state, to take advantage of the Commonwealth’s soft anti-SLAPP law.

Laura Prather

Unlike in California, where Depp and Heard each have homes, the law doesn’t immediately stop the case from going forward if a judge allows it. Instead, the law can only be used as a defense during trial.

“Forum shopping” like that by Depp’s lawyers is frequent, according to Prather, who was not involved in the case.

She was a partner at the Sedgwick law firm in Austin when she got involved with the abusive lawsuit issue in the mid-2000s. Prather moved in 2012 to Haynes and Boone, where she is head of the firm’s media law practice group and has represented various organizations—sometimes pro bono—targeted by lawsuits.

The Texas law passed a decade after the state became a SLAPP hotbed, according to Prather. The state’s Citizen Participation Act allows quick dismissal of those suits.

“There were a significant number of meritless lawsuits against reporters and others, often so the public did not find out what journalists were uncovering,” Prather said. “But there was no mechanism to stop these lawsuits.”

She successfully invoked the law to defend NBCUniversal Media in a 2021 lawsuit by former California Rep. Devin Nunes (R) against the company and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow over statements made on Maddow’s show. A court in Texas transferred the matter to New York, finding the case didn’t have sufficient local ties.

The Texas anti-SLAPP law was targeted by a variety of corporate and individual advocates in 2019. They pushed a change that would have allowed plaintiffs to threaten meritless suits, file those suits in court and then withdraw the suits within three days with their fees refunded. Prather countered with a coalition of more than 600 organizations, who fought to keep the law intact.

Europe Next

Prather heads to Paris in September, where she will be based as a Fulbright scholar for the next four-plus months.

She plans to work with Reporters Without Borders to evaluate legal systems in Europe, the factors that contribute to the rise of meritless lawsuits and current regulatory efforts to prevent such suits. She will also work with a coalition of 70 organizations aimed at developing EU-wide anti-SLAPP rules.

She hopes her work in Europe will also “rekindle” efforts to pass a federal law standardizing anti-SLAPP protections in the US.