Previous research is largely mute about the strategies that printers and their legal counsels used to defend state libel lawsuits. Analysis of the legal arguments employed in sixty-eight state libel jury trials in anglophone courts from 1699 to 1792 identifies which of them were most associated with acquittal. Jury-nullification arguments, based on freedom of the press, which encouraged jurors to disregard judges’ directives and to contravene the law, had a higher rate of success than did approaches based on the standard legal precedents of the period. These findings suggest that the public was sympathetic with a broad interpretation of press freedom at a time when many Crown judges attempted to limit it exclusively to prior restraint.