ABSTRACT
Writing history on occasion can be a perilous undertaking. Historians writing about recent events are committing inherently public acts. Especially when touching upon the motivations and actions of living or recently deceased people whose reputations are protected by defamation laws, historians need to exercise discretion. In his essay, “Defamation Cases against Historians,” Antoon de Baets points out that historians have become embroiled in defamation cases about important “contemporary events” such as “World War II (particularly war crimes, collaboration, and resistance) and colonial wars.” The issues involved in defamation are those “central to the historical profession”: “living versus deceased persons; facts versus opinions; legal versus historical truth; the relationship between human dignity, reputation, and privacy; the role of politicians, veterans, and Holocaust deniers as complainants; the problem of amnestied crimes.”1
