In a win for free speech, a federal court in North Dakota recently dismissed a baseless$900 million lawsuit brought by the Dakota Access Pipeline company against Greenpeace and a number of individual protesters. The company should have learned its lesson. Instead, it refiled the case in state court...

...This new lawsuit rehashes the same, tired arguments that it presented in federal court, but relies exclusively on state laws.

While the federal court ruled in favor of free speech and common sense, and while the re-filed version of the lawsuit is unlikely to succeed, these cases represent an alarming trend in the suppression of public activism. That’s why the ACLU joined a number of other public interest groups in founding the Protect the Protest Task Force, a coalition dedicated to fighting SLAPP cases.

These unfounded lawsuits attempt to abuse the judicial system in order to suppress constitutionally protected expression by intimidating activists and advocates...