It is a sad truth about the British media that a story's chances of making the newspapers increase in proportion to an editor's ability to attach breasts to it. The tale of how the makers of Boob Job tried to undermine freedom of speech by threatening Dr Dalia Nield was no exception to the rule.

I don't mean to mock. The press does not argue strongly enough for the freedom on which its business and our liberties depend and it was good to see journalists defend the doctor.

The Mail had asked her opinion of Rodial's claim that its £125 jars of Boob Job would expand breasts by half a cup size if a woman rubbed the cream into her chest for 56 days on the trot. Dr Nield is one of Britain's foremost cosmetic surgeons. She gave every impression of not believing a word of Rodial's hype. She told the Mail that women needed a lot more data from Rodial and wondered whether the cream would do more harm than good. For this, Rodial sent her a letter threatening defamation proceedings. Quite rightly, reporters protested about yet another attempt by our wretched legal profession to silence informed debate on matters of public interest.

Yet they missed the most sinister aspect of the affair. My colleagues at the Mail say that Boob Job has not sent threatening lawyers' letters to them. The Mail published the original story, it has the money to pay damages, but Boob Job is leaving it alone. Instead, it threatened to sue Dr Nield personally. They wanted to compel her to retract or risk losing her home, her savings – everything she has earned.

Rodial's behaviour fits a sinister pattern. When Simon Singh published his now famous attack on the "bogus" claims of back-pummelling chiropractic quacks, the British Chiropractic Association did not sue the Guardian, which ran the article. It, too, sued him personally and forced him to risk financial ruin and waste two years of his life in his ultimately successful battle against the purveyors of pseudo-science.

The American health conglomerate NMT is suing Peter Wilmshurst, one of the best doctors in the NHS, for criticising a procedure it uses to close holes in the heart. BBC Radio 4's Today interviewed Wilmshurst last year and he expressed his determination to fight the lawyers who wanted to limit scientific debate. NMT issued another writ to punish his fresh impertinence. It was not directed at the BBC but at Professor Wilmshurst.

For all the arguments about freedom of speech, there is surprising consensus around its basic principles. All democratic societies protect the official secrets of public officials and make it a criminal offence to reveal, say, troop movements in wartime. Only authoritarian societies push beyond the limit and jail defendants for criticising public officials rather than revealing their secrets, as Singapore showed by threatening to jail the British author Alan Shadrake last week for lambasting its judges' use of the death penalty.

All democracies have laws against incitement to commit a crime. As murder is a crime, they agree that the courts must punish those who would incite murder. However, democracies run the risk of turning authoritarian when they try to push incitement law to cover the new "hate speech" crimes. Incitement to racial hatred or incitement to religious hatred are contentious offences because it is not a crime to hate someone any more than it is a crime to envy them or lust after them. It may be a sin, but it is not a crime.

Finally, all democracies have some kind of libel law to compensate citizens for unwarranted damage to their reputation. With a bit of luck and a lot of arm-twisting, Parliament will reform libel in Britain because the legal profession has pushed the law beyond the limits any liberal democracy should tolerate.

If Rodial thinks it has suffered damage as a result of an unjustified attack on its spotless reputation, why isn't it suing the Mail, which has the money to make amends? Come to that, why didn't the chiropractors sue the Guardian or NMT sue the BBC?

Lawyers are targeting individuals because they are no longer over-interested in seeking compensation for real wrongs but in tying up or scaring off those who supply newspapers, politicians and the editors of scientific journals with the critical opinions informed debate relies upon. It is not just Big Pharma and alternative health cranks who have discovered the virtues of what Americans call "lawfare". Radical Islamists and Iraqi, Russian and Ukranian oligarchs have used the threat of crippling costs to shut down debate about their very interesting activities before it can properly begin.

England is providing an ugly illustration of the power of money in the law. I doubt if Richard E Davis, chief executive officer of NMT, thinks about his writs from one month to the next as he sits in his office in Boston, Massachusetts. Professor Wilsmshurst has been worrying about them every waking hour for two years.

Who can deny that fear works? Dalia Nield's lawyer is Robert Dougans, an excellent and dedicated solicitor. I'm sure he'll see off Rodial. But he tells me his client is stunned by what has happened and doesn't want to talk to the press. Even if Rodial drops its action, and it looks like it may, it will have shut up a sceptical voice we could do with hearing more from.

America stood where we stood in 1964. The issue it faced then was not the power of wealth but the power of white supremacists. Martin Luther King was leading a campaign of civil disobedience to draw attention to racism in the deep south. When the New York Times and other liberal papers ran accounts of police racism, however, the cops sued in front of confederate judges and all-white juries in Alabama. They won, of course.

Civil disobedience, like scientific inquiry, relies on the free flow of information to move public opinion and the libel law was shutting it down. In the case of the New York Times v Sullivan, the American Supreme Court said it was not prepared to see restrictions on free speech stop the advance of political freedom and tore up the laws it inherited from England.

The power of money is like the power of white supremacy. It trumps all and ensures that the playing field is never level. Almost 50 years on, it is about time that Britain followed the American example and rewrote rules that were designed to keep us in ignorance.