Earlier this month, Cambridge University Press (CUP) made the controversial decision not to publish a book concerning Vladimir Putin due to the possibility of libel suits. The publisher rejected the book the same week that Putin’s government was targeted by the EU and the US for its actions in Crimea.

The author, Karen Dawisha, director of Miami University’s Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, is an expert on Russian affairs. The book, which would have been her eighth published by CUP, covers the first one hundred days of Putin’s rise to power, exploring how Putin’s inner circle put the existing authoritarian regime in place.

After the CUP legal department reviewed the book, Dawisha received a letter from John Haslam at CUP informing her that they could not proceed with publishing “given the controversial subject matter of the book, and its basic premise that Putin’s power is founded on his links to organised crime, we are not convinced that there is a way to rewrite the book that would give us the necessary comfort”.

The letter, subsequently published in The Economist, went on to claim that: “The decision has nothing to do with the quality of your research or your scholarly credibility. It is simply a question of risk tolerance in light of our limited resources.”

A CUP spokesperson stated: “Decisions on whether allegations are or are not libellous are taken regularly by publishers of all kinds. These are not decisions that we take lightly or without careful consideration.”

In an open letter to CUP, Dawisha sympathised with the decision: “I understand the ultimate reasoning that the basic premise of the book was such that the Press decided that no matter how many legally acceptable qualifiers were inserted, the book could not be rewritten in a way to give you ‘comfort’”. In fact, Dawisha herself requested that the book be reviewed by the legal department.

Dawisha’s letter to CUP outlines her opinion on the state of the UK’s strict libel laws. The laws were obviously a concern for Dawisha from the beginning, as she had initially stated: “I think I would prefer to withdraw it and submit it to American publishers before it goes out to CUP readers and inevitably starts to circulate.”

She concludes: “The field of political science and Russian studies [...] needs to come to terms with the difficult situation that no empirical work on corruption (and probably many other topics) should be published with a British publisher.”

At one point, the UK’s libel laws allowed claimants to bring libel suits against publishers even if neither of the parties was based in the UK, encouraging ‘libel tourism’. Libel cases were preferentially pursued in the UK instead of other jurisdictions where there is better protection for persons issuing derogatory statements.

The laws discouraged the publishing of numerous controversial texts, including CUP’s Alms for Jihad, which concerned the funding of terrorist groups and was removed from circulation under pressure from a libel suit.

Such occurrences helped awaken the Libel Reform Campaign, culminating in the Defamation Act of 2013. The act introduced a new “serious harm threshold” for claims and, among other changes, narrowed the test for claims, allowing claims with limited connection to England and Wales to be excluded.