Find
Quick links
Cases
Ajinomoto Sweeteners Europe SAS v Asda Stores Ltd (No 2) (CA)
Comment
As regards the single-meaning rule in defamation, the Court recognised that nothing in this judgment would affect it, but they noted Diplock LJ's remarks in Slim v Daily Telegraph [1968] 2 QB 157 that the law of defamation had passed beyond redemption by the courts. Although, as Tugendhat J had observed at first instance, the single-meaning rule is a control mechanism, the Court of Appeal rejected its application to malicious falsehood principally on the basis of the obvious injustice that could occur with such a crude tool. As Rimer LJ noted [41]:
"The potential for injustice in the present case flows from the fact that, before discarding it as legally irrelevant, the judge made the finding he did as to [the claimant's meaning]. If the case were allowed to go to trial and the claimant were able to prove that such meaning was false, uttered with malice and calculated to damage it, why should it not be entitled to damages for the injury which the falsehood will have caused it? More importantly – and this is the primary remedy the claimant wants – why, if it can prove its case, should it not be entitled to have the defendant restrained by injunction from doing that which it wants to do, namely (presumably for its own commercial benefit) to continue to publish a falsehood that will continue to damage the claimant in the eyes of a substantial body of consumers? The result, however, of the application by the judge of the single meaning rule is that that body of consumers is removed from the court’s radar. The court instead satisfies itself with the fiction, contrary to its own finding, that the entire consuming public will interpret the defendant’s packaging as bearing a single innocuous meaning."