Two new anti-SLAPP bills have been introduced in Parliament, renewing pressure on the Government to act against abusive litigation aimed at silencing public-interest speech.
Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, or SLAPPs, are legal actions or threats intended less to win in court than to intimidate, exhaust or silence those speaking out on matters of public importance.
This week, Baroness Stowell of Beeston introduced an anti-SLAPP private member’s bill in the House of Lords, while Sir John Whittingdale MP introduced a separate bill in the Commons. Both proposals would create an early dismissal mechanism, allowing courts to dispose of abusive claims before defendants are forced into ruinously expensive proceedings.
Although private members’ bills rarely become law without government support, the introduction of parallel bills in both Houses nevertheless keeps anti-SLAPP reform firmly before Parliament and gives ministers a ready-made legislative vehicle if they choose to act. The Lord Chancellor, David Lammy, told MPs in May that the Government would bring forward legislation “as soon as time allows”.
This recent flurry of legislative activity makes the Department for Education’s (DfE’s) current survey on SLAPPs and academic freedom especially important. Although SLAPPs are most often associated with journalists and campaigners, academics can also be targeted when their research challenges powerful individuals, companies or institutions.
In practice, an academic’s ability to pursue critical research into powerful actors often turns on whether their institution is willing to stand behind them. Yet many universities offer little in the way of insurance, legal review, or other safeguards capable of mitigating these risks, leaving scholars to shoulder the costs themselves.
The consequences are felt not only by individual researchers but also at the point of publication, where academic presses have been known to shift legal exposure to authors or editors, or simply decline to publish research likely to provoke legal action. A cautionary example is the Russia scholar Professor Karen Dawisha, who was dropped by her long-time publisher Cambridge University Press, which had initially agreed to publish her book, after concluding that the libel risk under English law was too high. The manuscript later appeared in the United States as Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?
As the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) reported last week, the DfE is inviting UK-based academics to complete a survey exploring the prevalence and impact of legal threats directed at researchers and their work. The survey is open both to academics who have personally received legal threats relating to their research or publications and to those concerned about such threats affecting their field.
CAF believes this is an important opportunity to help shape any future legislation before its terms are fixed. If anti-SLAPP reform is framed too narrowly around journalism, it may fail to capture the particular ways in which legal threats operate in academic life – by deterring research, pressuring universities or publishers, chilling scholarly publication, and making academics more cautious about contributing to public debate.
A strong evidence base will make it harder for those pressures to be overlooked. Academics wishing their responses to inform the next stage of the project are encouraged to submit them by 11.45pm on Friday 19 June 2026, although the survey will remain open after that date.
The survey takes approximately five to twenty minutes to complete and can be accessed here.
CAF Research Manager Freddie Attenborough has written more about the particular threats that SLAPPs pose to academic freedom for The Critic here.