Anti-SLAPP Laws: What a SLAPP Suit Is and How a Special Motion to Strike Works

SLAPP stands for strategic lawsuit against public participation. It describes a case filed not to win a judgment but to impose the cost, delay and stress of litigation on someone who spoke out — a reviewer, a journalist, a neighbor at a zoning hearing, a former employee. The term was coined by two University of Denver researchers in the 1980s. No court label marks a case as a SLAPP; it is a description of why a case appears to have been brought.

It asks the court to throw out the claim at the very start of the case, before the parties spend money on discovery. Under most anti-SLAPP statutes the motion does three things at once: it puts the burden on the plaintiff to show the claim has real merit, it freezes discovery while the motion is pending, and it makes the losing plaintiff pay the defendant's attorney fees if the motion succeeds. The fee provision is what gives the statute its force, because it changes the economics that make a SLAPP worth filing.

At step one the defendant must show the claim arises from protected speech or petitioning activity covered by the statute. If the defendant fails, the motion is denied and the case proceeds normally. If the defendant succeeds, the burden shifts to the plaintiff at step two to show the claim has enough merit to go forward. In California that means demonstrating a probability of prevailing, a minimal-merit standard under which the court accepts the plaintiff's evidence as true rather than weighing it. A claim that clears step two survives; one that does not is stricken.

Most of them, though the count depends on whether weak statutes are counted and it keeps changing. California, Texas, New York, Washington, Colorado and dozens of others have one; a handful of states still have none. Seventeen states have now adopted the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act, a model statute drafted by the Uniform Law Commission that standardizes the motion, the discovery stay, the fee award and the right to appeal. South Dakota became the sixteenth adopting state in March 2026 and Missouri the seventeenth in July 2026. There is no federal anti-SLAPP statute.

It depends on the circuit, and the federal appeals courts are openly split. The First, Ninth and Federal Circuits have allowed state anti-SLAPP motions in federal cases; the Second, Fifth, Tenth, Eleventh and D.C. Circuits have held the statutes do not apply there, generally reasoning that they conflict with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and are procedural rather than substantive under the Erie doctrine. The Second Circuit has allowed certain fee-shifting provisions even so. Because the answer turns on where a case is filed, the split creates a real incentive to shop for a forum.

It can try, and defendants sometimes do when a claim is built on the company's own court filings, regulatory submissions or public statements. California addressed the tactic directly in Code of Civil Procedure section 425.17, which carves certain suits out of the anti-SLAPP statute entirely: actions brought solely in the public interest or on behalf of the general public, subject to conditions, and claims arising from a seller's factual representations about its own goods and services made to promote sales. Those exemptions have their own exceptions, including one that restores anti-SLAPP protection for news reporting and creative works, and courts read the commercial speech exemption narrowly.

Being sued and losing are different things. Businesses have sued reviewers for defamation, and in a state with an anti-SLAPP statute a review on a matter of public interest is the kind of speech the statute was written to protect, which can end the case early and shift fees. Separately, the federal Consumer Review Fairness Act voids form-contract clauses that bar customers from posting honest negative reviews or that penalize them for doing so. Neither protects a statement the reviewer knows to be false. This page is general information, not legal advice about any particular review or lawsuit.

The case proceeds. A denial is a procedural ruling that the plaintiff cleared an early threshold; it is not a finding that the defendant said anything false or is liable for anything. Many state statutes let the losing defendant appeal a denial immediately, which pauses the case further. In federal court that is now narrower: sitting en banc in Gopher Media, LLC v. Melone on October 9, 2025, the Ninth Circuit overruled its own long-standing precedent and held that the denial of a California anti-SLAPP motion is not immediately appealable under the collateral order doctrine.