The Lachaux ruling has brought some much-needed clarity to the definition of serious harm in defamation cases, says Athelstane Aamodt
- Defamation cases have historically struggled to define and test what constitutes serious harm to a claimant’s reputation.
- The recent Lachaux judgment has brought a more streamlined and simplified approach to these proceedings.
On 12 September 2017, the Court of Appeal handed down one of the most important defamation judgments in years. Lachaux v Independent Print Ltd [2017] EWCA Civ 1334 was a decision concerned with how the test of ‘serious harm’ (introduced by s 1(1) of the Defamation Act 2013) was defined and how it operated. However, to understand why Lachaux is so important, it is necessary to look at how things stood before the introduction of the new 2013 Act.
Hurt feelings
The common-law tests for whether a statement is defamatory are well-known to anyone that has studied law; very broadly, they coalesce into the following headings.
A statement should be taken to be defamatory if:
- it may tend to lower the claimant in the estimation of right-thinking members of society generally ( Sim v Stretch [1936]
