Effective on January 1, 2025, the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act, known as UPEPA, will be the law in Maine. You can read a copy of this act here. The UPEPA will supplant Maine’s previous Anti-SLAPP Act which was limited to the right to petition and was also short on procedural specifics. The UPEPA will dramatically expand Maine’s protection for free speech and also offer the powerful benefit of uniformity of interpretation with the other UPEPA states.
For those unfamiliar with Anti-SLAPP laws such as the UPEPA, these laws operate to allow a person who has been sued for the exercise of their free speech rights to seek an early dismissal of the litigation. The goal is to prevent such a person from having to suffer through the costs, expenses, and mental stress of an abusive lawsuit that in the end will be dismissed as a matter of law anyway. Another way to think of Anti-SLAPP laws is that they move the summary judgment motion to the start of the case, instead of at the close of discovery when such motions are usually brought. For this reason, Anti-SLAPP motions (including UPEPA motions) are sometimes thought of as a “motion to dismiss on steroids”.
In adopting uniform legislation, state legislatures will often tinker with the proposed uniform act so as to address concerns that are specific to that state. This tinkering results in something known as non-uniform provisions. A quick glance at the statute shows that Maine has done very little such tinkering, adding only the following provision in an attempt to expand the scope of the Maine UPEPA’s protections:
“Written or oral statement made in connection with a discrimination complaint pursuant to the Maine Human Rights Act or any written or oral statement made in connection with a complaint pursuant to Title 20-A, chapter 445 or the so-called Title IX provisions of the federal Education Amendments of 1972, Public Law 92-318.”
This speech was probably protected under the UPEPA’s coverage for free speech generally, but it does no harm to the act. Otherwise, it does not appear (again, at first glance) that Maine has otherwise significantly altered the text of the UPEPA. This makes Maine’s adoption of the UPEPA perhaps the cleanest of all the adoptions so far.
The legislative year 2024 may prove to be a big one for UPEPA adoptions, with about 10 other states considering this uniform act. States that have already adopted the UPEPA in addition to Maine are Hawaii, Kentucky, New Jersey, Utah and Washington. Oregon has also modified its own organic Anti-SLAPP statute to bring it closely in line with the UPEPA. California, Texas and New York and several other states have their own Anti-SLAPP legislation which pre-dates the UPEPA but functions very similarly, albeit without the benefit of uniformity of interpretation.
Otherwise, the UPEPA is doing exactly the job for which it was originally intended, which was to provide an out-of-the-box and state-of-the-art Anti-SLAPP law for those states which do not already have such a statute, and to modernize the older or weaker Anti-SLAPP laws of other states, such as Maine. More such states to come!
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