MFIA Clinic’s Brief in Drake Defamation Appeal Draws Widespread Media Attention

A Yale Law School amici brief in Aubrey Drake Graham’s appeal of the dismissal of his defamation lawsuit against UMG Recordings, Inc. has drawn attention from The New York Times, Billboard, Digital Music News, MSN, and the media law podcast SLANDERTOWN.

The brief, filed by the Media Freedom & Information Access (“MFIA”) clinic on behalf of the Floyd Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression at Yale Law School and University of Florida law professor Lyrissa Lidsky, supports affirming the dismissal of Drake’s defamation claim over Kendrick Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us.” The district court dismissed the claim on the grounds that the allegedly defamatory statements are nonactionable opinion. The MFIA clinic’s brief offers an alternative ground to affirm the dismissal: because consent is an absolute bar to a defamation claim, Drake cannot pursue a defamation claim premised on the very statements he invited Lamar to publish. 

As Adam Liptak of The New York Times put it, the brief “picked up on the judge’s hint that Drake had opened himself up to the attacks” and placed that point “in a doctrinal context.” 

The Times highlighted the brief’s opening analogy: “Suppose a self-assured boxer challenges the world champion to a prize fight, is knocked out on live television, and, with bruised ego and body, files a lawsuit for battery.” That lawsuit would fail, the brief explains, because “[t]he challenger consented to the fight.” So, too, with Drake’s defamation suit, the brief contends.

PODCAST: Students discuss the brief on SLANDERTOWN

The brief is the subject of a longer conversation on SLANDERTOWN, a podcast devoted to “First Amendment slugfests.” In the episode, host Dan Novack interviewed MFIA Student Director Raymond Perez ’26, one of the students who helped craft the brief, and MFIA Visiting Associate Clinical Professor John Langford ’14 about why a celebrity rap feud raises a serious legal question.

Perez explained the consent argument in plain terms. 

“Consent is a defense to most torts,” he said. “If I said, ‘Dan, please call me a criminal,’ I’m on the street corner saying, ‘Call me a criminal,’ and then you call me a criminal and I turn around and I say, ‘I’m filing suit against you for defamation,’” courts around the country recognize that the suit would be foreclosed under black-letter consent-to-defamation principles. “That’s what we’re saying happened here.”

The discussion also addressed the limits of the argument. The brief does not say that anything goes once two artists start trading diss tracks. Perez argued that the question is what a plaintiff had reason to anticipate. A boxer who enters the ring has consented to punches within the rules of the match, not to anything imaginable. Here, Perez said, the match between invitation and response was unusually direct, because Drake asked Lamar to make the very claims he now sues over.

Perez noted that rap battles may not look like classic First Amendment cases but they do fit within MFIA’s broader commitment to cultural democracy. They are not New York Times v. Sullivan or New York Times Company v. United States, he acknowledged, but they are “very important to our culture” nonetheless. The concern, he explained, is that courts should not step too quickly into cultural disputes and shut down the kind of expressive exchange that the First Amendment protects.

The clinic notes that the media attention given to the brief reflects why the appeal has resonated beyond the Drake–Kendrick feud. A dispute that began with diss tracks could become a test of how courts understand artistic provocation, rhetorical combat, and defamation law. The question is not just whether one rapper went too far, the clinic argues, but how the law protects individuals’ ability to voluntarily participate in fora dedicated to insult and barbed-discourse.