argued that accuracy was no guarantee against breaches of the king's peace by
people who had been defamed. Thus in Star Chamber libel prosecutions, once
a defamatory statement was shown to have been communicated, the only
important legal question was whether or not the defendant, in point of fact,
was the person who had disseminated the offensive material. Royal officers,
lesser public officials, and private litigants all found that they possessed
considerable legal advantages in Star Chamber libel prosecutions, and actions
for seditious libel, as well as for ordinary criminal libel, became frequent. ⁹

After abolition of Star Chamber in 1641, during the English Revolution,
common law courts assumed jurisdiction over criminal libel prosecutions.
After some controversy, the courts retained the basic outlines of Star Cham-
ber's libel doctrines. In common law prosecutions for libel, judges ruled on the
"law of the case"--whether publication was libelous--and juries decided the
"facts of the case"--whether defendants had really published the libels. ¹⁰

As every late twentieth-century One-L or cub reporter is supposed to know,
however, the greatest dangers in libel have for many years been not from fines
or jail terms but from civil suits for monetary damages. Once, English local
and church courts, rather than common law tribunals, heard civil defamation
cases. But during the first half of the sixteenth century, common law courts
began to accept jurisdiction in at least some types of defamation cases. The
rise of commercial-capitalist relationships, for example, placed increased im-
portance on the reputations of leading merchants, and seventeenth-century
common law courts began to grant money damages for slanderous attacks
upon the good names of England's commercial elite. ¹¹ Because Star Chamber
effectively controlled printed libels, common law courts dealt almost exclu-
sively with slander. Although truth ultimately became an issue in most civil
suits, common law defamation cases did not, at the outset of the trial anyway,
turn on the falsity of the statement. ¹² If the offending words fell within the
bounds of defamation law, a defendant could begin an action. ¹³ And in strict
legal theory, courts did not focus on any actual personal injury to the plain-
tiff--such as emotional damage from the libel--but on the injury to the
litigant's reputation, on any injury that might affect relationships with other
people. ¹⁴

Long before the rise of modern mass communication media, then, the law of
civil defamation involved the process of true public "communication." Defam-
atory statements, for example, were not actionable unless "communicated" to
a third party. ¹⁵ Persons who insulted their neighbors in a one-to-one showdown
in colonial America could get themselves, as we shall see, into legal difficul-
ties; but, under strict common law theory, a suit for defamation required that a
third party must have heard the critical statements. ¹⁶ Similarly, libelous state-
ments contained in a letter from one person to another were not actionable
because they were not "communicated" to a third party.

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