A libel is a defamation expressed in written or other graphic form that tends to blacken the memory of the dead or that tends to injure a living person's reputation and thereby expose the person to public hatred, contempt or ridicule, or financial injury or to impeach any person's honesty, integrity, virtue, or reputation or to publish the natural defects of anyone and thereby expose the person to public hatred, ridicule, or financial injury.
Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 73.001
ELEMENTS OF LIBEL
Applied in 128 court decisions — leading case Colson v. Grohman (1999)
Most recently applied in Warren v. Fed. Nat'l Mortg. Ass'n (August 2019)
Acts 1985, 69th Leg., ch. 959, Sec. 1, eff
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Official source: Texas Constitution and Statutes. Reproduced from public-domain Texas statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.