Art. 2542.Grounds For Recognition of Foreign Defamation Judgments

Article 2541 treats most foreign judgments generously, routing them through an ordinary proceeding without a demanding, court-by-court reexamination of how the foreign tribunal reached its result. Article 2542 carves out a different rule for one category: defamation, libel, and slander judgments rendered outside the United States. The definition matters here -- a "foreign defamation judgment" under this article comes from a country outside the United States and its territories, not from a sister state. A defamation judgment from another American state still gets ordinary treatment under Article 2541 and full faith and credit; only judgments from foreign national court systems trigger this article's scrutiny.

The reason for that different treatment is a concern sometimes described as libel tourism: a plaintiff suing an American speaker or publisher in a country whose defamation law favors plaintiffs far more than American law does, then trying to enforce the resulting judgment back in the United States, on statements that might never have supported liability under American law. American defamation law rests on strong constitutional protection for speech and the press, and Article 2542 keeps a foreign judgment from a system without comparable protection from automatically becoming enforceable in Louisiana.

The article builds that skepticism into layered grounds for withholding recognition. Some go to the basics of a fair proceeding: recognition is unavailable if the foreign system lacked impartial tribunals or due process, or if the foreign court lacked personal or subject-matter jurisdiction. Others track familiar grounds for questioning any foreign judgment -- inadequate notice, fraud, conflict with a public policy of this state, conflict with another final judgment, violation of a forum-selection agreement, an inconvenient forum where jurisdiction rested only on personal service, and a lack of reciprocity from the foreign jurisdiction. The most distinctive ground is speech-specific: a Louisiana court can decline recognition on finding that the defamation law the foreign court applied gave less protection to speech and the press than the Louisiana and United States constitutions would have given in the same case.

Paragraph D adds a jurisdictional tool for the person targeted by a foreign defamation judgment. For a declaratory action testing whether that judgment deserves recognition, Louisiana courts have personal jurisdiction over whoever obtained it, so long as the target is a Louisiana resident, is otherwise subject to Louisiana jurisdiction, has assets here, or would have to take action in Louisiana to comply with the judgment. That lets someone facing a foreign defamation judgment go to a Louisiana court first and seek a declaration that the judgment will not be recognized, rather than waiting to be sued on it here.