Ordered to pay $503,723 under the fee-shifting provision in the District of Columbia’s Anti-Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation Act, a Stanford engineering professor argued that the defendants didn’t qualify as “prevailing parties” because he voluntarily dropped his lawsuit before the trial judge ruled on their statutory motion to short-circuit the litigation.The plaintiff, Mark Z. Jacobson, filed a $10 million defamation claim against Christopher T. M. Clack, Ph.D., and the National Academy of Sciences …