Thirteen years ago, I took on what I thought to be the exciting and challenging task of representing National Review and former National Review contributor Mark Steyn in a lawsuit brought in D.C. Superior Court by then-Penn State professor Michael Mann arising out of a Corner post by Mr. Steyn. In that post, Steyn quoted another blogger’s criticism of Mr. Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” graph, which had been adopted and overhyped by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. One of the first things I told my clients was that they’d have to be patient — the wheels of “justice” often turn slowly. But I had thought at the time that a reasonable judge would likely dismiss the case for what it was — a desperate plea for attention from an attention-loving plaintiff.
Thirteen years later, the case still grinds through the D.C. local courts. It has left in its wake the longstanding relationship between Steyn and National Review, which fell apart in the stresses of litigation, as well as my own friendship (regrettably) and professional relationship with Steyn — who, after we lost the motion to dismiss that should have ended the case in its earliest days, decided to go it alone and largely represent himself in what was to become a Sisyphean ordeal (he later brought on my friend Christopher Bartolomucci, a truly outstanding lawyer, to work with him at trial). And it has cost millions of dollars and countless man hours devoted to litigating an alleged defamatory post that, at the end of the day, a jury found caused no economic harm to Mann. As Steyn often notes with an understandable (though perhaps at times inadvisable) public disdain, the litigation process has caused enough damage to Steyn and National Review to eclipse any possible harm alleged by Mann from a post that only garnered any significant attention when a lawsuit was filed.
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