Chilling Effects from Anti-SLAPP Laws

Schaufele, Brandon (2022): Chilling Effects from Anti-SLAPP Laws.

Abstract

Anti-SLAPP legislation has proliferated across the US and Canada. SLAPPs are strategic lawsuits against public participation, "private claims whose objective is to chill opposition by limiting parties' ability to participate in public debate. SLAPPs involve a complementarity between a private harm, typically the tort of defamation, and an extra-judicial project, often a real estate development. This paper incorporates SLAPPS into a standard model of frivolous litigation, demonstrating that the economic implications of SLAPPs are narrower than frequently portrayed. A staggered adoption difference-in-differences research design is applied to empirically estimate the chilling effects of anti-SLAPP laws on construction investment and new home starts in Canada. Results demonstrate that anti-SLAPP laws do chill construction investment by roughly $80 million per month within Canadian cities. New starts of single family homes also decline by 120 per month relative to a counterfactual scenario where anti-SLAPP laws do not exist.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Anti-SLAPP laws, chilling effects, civil procedure, frivolous lawsuits, real estate development, tort.
• Subjects: K - Law and Economics > K1 - Basic Areas of Law > K13 - Tort Law and Product Liability ; Forensic Economics; K - Law and Economics > K4 - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior > K41 - Litigation Process; R - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics > R3 - Real Estate Markets, Spatial Production Analysis, and Firm Location > R31 - Housing Supply and Markets

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