Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reynolds is a landmark defamation case because it brought fault, in the form of reasonableness, into the law. In so doing, it tilted the balance between reputation and speech in England, affected the way journalists do their work, and influenced the law throughout the common law world. This is the story of Reynolds and its famous ‘privilege’. In some ways, Reynolds is a simple case about whether a newspaper defamed a politician when it implied the politician was a liar and failed to publish his explanation of events. At issue was whether an honest but mistaken news article about a politician was protected by the defence of qualified privilege. In holding that the existing law of qualified privilege could afford a defence for media who report on matters of public interest, although not on the facts of the case, Reynolds seems rather uninteresting. But its important innovation was its holding that media have a duty to communicate on matters of public interest, and the public a reciprocal interest in receiving the information, so long as the defendant behaved responsibly in publishing. It set out criteria to consider in assessing responsibleness. In so doing, Reynolds introduced a fault-based defence into the otherwise strict-liability tort of defamation. The House of Lords’ decision was fairly narrow (applying the existing law of qualified privilege, applying to journalism, setting strict criteria of responsibleness), and some judges were initially hostile even to that narrow extension of the doctrine. Nevertheless, subsequent cases and legislation in the England and abroad have expanded the scope of Reynolds privilege. Reynolds’ fault-based defence, or something like it, can now be found in defamation law throughout the common law world. This chapter examines the history and influence of Reynolds to date, and also imagines what its future influence might me. Specifically, given the flexibility of the responsible communication test, it should withstand changes in communications technology and changes to the law of defamation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".