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. The paper then applies a staggered adoption difference-in-differences research design 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.

Keywords: Anti-SLAPP laws, chilling effects, civil procedure, frivolous lawsuits, real estate development, tort

JEL Classification: K41, K15, R39