ABSTRACT
Academic journals are often considered a sleepy backwater of litigation. Legal eyes rarely flicker over their pages; scholarly controversies may excite little more than a lawyer’s yawn. No place here for the legal quarrels associated with the publication of, say, material labeled critical to national security, or magazine articles that disparage public figures. Or so it may seem. In fact, lawsuits against historians are far more common than might be thought, as I was to discover in the late 1980s and early 1990s.1 For, in writing a review article on commissioned medical histories, called “Contracting Cancer,” my publishers and I were threatened with lawsuits. Indeed, I was involved in an intense controversy that threatened to reach the higher levels of British government.
