Non-compliance with a Public Health Act 1875 notice did not necessarily and naturally involve damage to the defendant’s fair name.
Buckley LJ summarised the effect of the Quartz Hill case: ‘So the exception of civil proceedings, so far as they are excepted, depends, not upon any essential difference between civil and criminal proceedings, but upon the fact that in civil proceedings the poison and the antidote are presented simultaneously. The publicity of the proceedings is accompanied by the refutation of the unfounded charge, if it be unfounded, which was made. If there be no scandal, if there be no danger of loss of life, limb, or liberty, if there be no pecuniary damage, the action will not lie.’
Phillimore LJ added that an action for malicious prosecution of civil proceedings lies only when ‘the bane comes before the antidote, and mischief may be done which it will be too late to overtake’.
Judges:
Buckley, Phillimore LJJ
Citations:
[1915] 1 KB 600
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Williamson v The Attorney General of Trinidad and Tobago PC 3-Sep-2014
(Trinidad and Tobago) The claimant had been held after arrest on suspicion of theft. He was held for several months before the case was dismissed, the posecution having made no apparent attempt to further the prosecution. He appealed against refusal . .
Cited – Willers v Joyce and Another (Re: Gubay (Deceased) No 1) SC 20-Jul-2016
Parties had been involved in an action for wrongful trading. This was not persisted with but the claimant sought damages saying that the action was only part of a campaign to do him harm. This appeal raised the question whether the tort of malicious . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Torts – Other
Updated: 02 June 2022; Ref: scu.536471