The House described the different origins of libel and slander. Libel was regarded by the Court of Star Chamber not merely as a crime punishable as such, but also as a wrong carrying the penalty of general damages, and this remedy was carried forward by the common law courts after Star Chamber was abolished by the Long Parliament. Slander, on the other hand, was never punished in the civil courts as a crime. The old local courts used to take cognisance of it as giving rise to claims for compensation, and when those courts decayed, the entire jurisdiction in cases of defamation appeared to have passed at first to the Courts of the Church rather than the Courts of the King. Following the Reformation, the Courts of the King assumed concurrent jurisdiction in claims arising out of spoken defamation: ‘As might have been expected of civil courts, whose concern had been primarily with material rights and not with discipline as such, the new jurisdiction in claims based on slander appears to have been directed to the ascertainment of actual damage suffered and to a remedy limited to such damage. This explains the restricted character of the development of the remedy and the tendency to confine its scope by the assertion that actual damage was the gist of the action.’
Judges:
Viscount Haldane, Lord Sumner
Citations:
[1916] 2 AC 481, [1916] UKHL 2
Links:
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Citing:
Cited – Allsop v Allsop 25-Apr-1860
Complaint was made of illness allegedly caused by a slanderous imputation of unchastity to a married woman. The woman heard the slander at third hand. It was held that the woman could not claim special damages for her illness in an action for . .
Cited by:
Cited – Watkins v Secretary of State for The Home Departmentand others CA 20-Jul-2004
The claimant complained that prison officers had abused the system of reading his solicitor’s correspondence whilst he was in prison. The defendant argued that there was no proof of damage.
Held: Proof of damage was not necessary in the tort . .
Cited – Lachaux v Independent Print Ltd and Another SC 12-Jun-2019
Need to Show Damage Increased by 2013 Act
The claimant alleged defamation by three publishers. The articles were held to have defamatory meaning, but the papers argued that the defamations did not reach the threshold of seriousness in section 1(1) of the 2013 Act.
Held: The appeal . .
Cited – Simon and Others v Lyder and Another PC 29-Jul-2019
(Trinidad and Tobago) The Board was asked as to the well-known conundrum in the common law of defamation, namely the extent to which (if at all) two or more different statements made upon different occasions by the same defendant may be aggregated . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Defamation
Updated: 24 April 2022; Ref: scu.199937
