It was no surprise that Illinois Supreme Court chief justice Robert Thomas won a $7 million jury verdict in a libel suit against a small Illinois daily, the Kane County Chronicle. Most libel actions are tossed out of court without going to trial, but once jurors get their hands on a case they usually favor plaintiffs. That calls to mind the observation that no one should watch laws, sausage or journalism being made. The sometimes messy details of how material is gathered and published, when spelled out in court, can put jurors in a mood to teach the press a lesson.

Most of those pro-plaintiff verdicts are reversed or reduced on appeal, so Justice Thomas would be prudent not to go on a spending spree just yet, though, as a member of the Illinois judiciary, the odds on his prevailing on appeal may be better than most.

Libel litigation is among the least satisfactory areas of the law. Plaintiffs seldom win or even get a clear-cut ruling on whether the statement they contend damaged their reputation was false. As for media defendants, they can pay dearly not just for legal defense, but by intrusion into the editorial process that is a major feature of defamation actions. The public loses, too, when fear of libel suits leads to self-censorship.

Is there a better way? Probably not, if libel plaintiffs are primarily after money. Media defendants are not likely to want to give up the considerable protections they have under the present system, as unsatisfactory as it is, if they can be at risk of large money awards.

Is the quest for riches at the root of libel litigation? A study by the University of Iowa’s Libel Research Project in the 1980s found convincing evidence that many libel plaintiffs want vindication rather than money. My colleagues, Randall Bezanson and John Soloski, and I interviewed large numbers of libel plaintiffs for the project. The plaintiffs told us repeatedly that they wanted false statements about themselves corrected or retracted rather than money. Their actions immediately after the stories appeared were consistent with an interest in vindication – many went initially to the publications to complain and hired lawyers only when their requests for the record to be set straight were brushed off. Interestingly, the lawyer for Justice Thomas told the New York Times his client would not have brought suit if there had been a retraction.

We followed up our findings with an experimental project to provide a non-litigation way to resolve libel disputes. We contacted lawyers for both sides in pending cases and urged them to ask their clients to submit the issues to disinterested third parties to make findings, which would be publicized by the news organizations in the cases. No money would change hands.

The experiment was largely a failure as very few on either side of the disputes were willing to utilize what was essentially alternative dispute-resolution. The main problem we encountered was a belief by both parties that a willingness to drop the cases in favor of the dispute-resolution route would be taken as an admission of weakness, so neither party wanted to be the first to signal an interest in the process.

We dealt with the lawyers, and were dependent on them to sell the alternative to their clients. The plaintiff lawyers had their own agendas. In litigation, there would be the prospect of money damages while under our alternative system there would be no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The lawyers we contacted were notably cool to our proposed no-money alternative.

The cases we pursued were in various stages in the legal system. We found that once a libel suit is on track it becomes very difficult to derail. And that while money damages may not be high on the agenda of plaintiffs at the outset, they become much more of an issue once lawyers are in the picture and expenses pile up.

The bottom line, we found, is that there is a place for alternative dispute resolution in libel disputes but that place is very early in the dispute, such as when Justice Thomas and the Kane County Chronicle initially disagreed about whether what was published was true or false and before the case went to court.

Journalism organizations would be well-advised to create such dispute resolution machinery and encourage news organizations to suggest to unhappy subjects of news coverage that they use it. That’s far better than battling it out in court under a legal system in which everybody loses except possibly lawyers who are paid an hourly fee.

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Gilbert Cranberg was founder of the Iowa Libel Research Project and co-author, with Randall Bezanson and John Soloski, of “Libel Law and the Press,” (Free Press) winner of the 1987 Society of Professional Journalists award for research in journalism.