Complaint was made as to observations made by an architect and said to be defamatory.
Held: These had referred to a criticism of the system under which the architect was employed and not to the architect individually.
Viscount Haldane said: ‘The question which we have to deal with we have to decide as Judges of law. It is whether it is possible, if the language used is read in its ordinary sense, to say that it is such as can reasonably and naturally support the innuendo . . The pursuer must . . when he puts forward his innuendo, put it forward either on the footing that the language taken by itself supports the innuendo, or that there is extrinsic evidence, extrinsic to the libel itself, which shows that that was the sense in which the words were intended to be construed.’
Judges:
Viscount Haldane
Citations:
1916 SC (HL) 102
Jurisdiction:
Scotland
Cited by:
Cited – Mccann v Scottish Media Newspapers Ltd SCS 18-Feb-1999
Three articles which appeared in one edition of a newspaper had to be read together and treated as ‘constituting a whole’ for the purposes of determining meaning, where the first ended with a cross-reference to the second, and the second ended with . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Defamation
Updated: 30 April 2022; Ref: scu.236348
