“Speech is global now – like it or not,” legal counsel to Bloomberg News, Charles Glasser Jr. said.

Friends and colleagues had gathered Thursday to celebrate the publication of “International Libel & Privacy Handbook: A Global Reference for Journalists, Publishers, Webmasters, and Lawyers” (Bloomberg Press). The book, which Mr. Glasser edited, summarizes libel and privacy laws across the world, spanning eight countries and drawing on 37 experts.

Bloomberg News editor in chief Matthew Winkler, who wrote the foreword to the book, introduced Mr. Glasser by saying he is a rare journalist, legal scholar, and practicing lawyer rolled into one. Mr. Winkler said the book was indispensable for any news organization that has to cover news in a global context.

Speaking before the crowd, Mr. Glasser said, “We are living in very interesting times, in the Chinese sense of the word. We are in a place where there’s a government that seems to think that reporters should be prosecutorial witnesses. We live in a time where apparently being a cartoonist is to ask for a death penalty.” He continued, “But we don’t want to just survive these times: we want to thrive.”

He told The New York Sun how the book came about. After graduating from New York University School of Law, he practiced journalism law in New England as well as New York, where he worked for a law firm representing the New York Post.

Upon joining Bloomberg News, he said he quickly realized that as an employee of a global company, he “had to get smart in a hurry about the law in all these countries.” He continued, “I started to build notebooks on France, Italy, Germany … so that when my phone rings and it’s a reporter in Milan, I could say hang on a minute” and he would have some materials at hand to help in giving advice on the law in that country.

“After I started to put these notebooks together, I said, my gosh, why isn’t there a book?” So he edited one himself. “Necessity is the mother of invention,” he said.

At the party, some contributors to the book were present, including Edward Davis and Peter Karanjia of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, who collaborated on the chapter about law in Hong Kong; Thomas Golden of Willkie Farr & Gallagher, who co-authored the chapter on American law; and Nancy Wolff of Wolff & Godin, who wrote a chapter entitled, “Fair Use: It Stops at the Border.”

Victor A. Kovner, a first amendment attorney at Davis Wright Tremaine, said Mr.Glasser’s volume was an important book about free expression. He said that lawyers and judges in court would cite the book and added that any serious lawyer has to understand the risks of libel around the world. “There’s no other publication that comes close to the scope of the information in this book,” he said.

Getting a copy of his book signed was Andrew Sims, who teaches at Fordham Law School. Nearby was Dave Heller, who edits the MediaLawLetter at the Media Law Resource Center, a nonprofit that a number of media organizations organized to survey developments and further First Amendment rights in the area of privacy and libel. Mr. Glasser was once an intern at this organization.

Others seen were Ilaria Maggioni and Robert Kunstadt of R. Kunstadt P.C., and David Korzenik, of Miller Korzenik Sommers LLP, who teaches at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Mr. Korzenik was talking with Forbes editorial counsel, Lynn Oberlander, who teaches law at the New School.

Mr. Korzenik said Mr. Glasser’s book did an admirable job in pulling together the various thinking on the subject to help an American lawyer understand what the perils out there are in different jurisdictions. “You can put something on the web here, writing it for an American audience and get sued in Australia or the U.K.”

Also attending was United States District Judge in the Eastern District of New York, Nicholas G. Garaufis and his wife, a nonprofit consultant, Betsy Seidman. Her mother, Annabel Henry Seidman, was an early member of the Congress of Racial Equality and its New York treasurer.

The Knickerbocker spoke with an administrative law judge at the Environmental Control Board, Madelon Rosenfeld, who was with her husband, Ira Block, a photographer. Ms. Rosenfeld knows Mr. Glasser not through legal battles but through another kind of skirmishing – that of fencing. “He is a fierce competitor,” she said, “but always a gentleman.”