CHARACTER IN A BLUE BAG.
Two attorneys quarrel about a matter of business; one of them accuses the other of trickery; the latter retorts on the former by calling him a liar and a scoundrel: and the first attorney brings an action for slander against the second. Whereon, according to the report of the case:—
"The Lord Chief Justice, in summing up, said it was not actionable to say of a man personally, 'you are a liar,' or 'you are a scoundrel;' nor was it actionable to combine the epithets, and say, 'you are a lying scoundrel;' but, if said of an attorney in his professional character, those words would be actionable."
What the law—speaking by the Lord Chief Justice—means to say, is, that abuse, in order to be actionable, must be injurious; that to call an attorney a lying and scoundrelly man does him no injury; whereas, calling him a lying and scoundrelly attorney tends to injure him in his profession. The law, therefore, presumes, that you may esteem a man to be a true and honest attorney, whilst in every other capacity you consider him a false and mean rascal; so that you may be willing to confide the management of your affairs to him, although you will not trust him with anything else.
It is curious that the rule applied to the defamation of lawyers is reversed in its application to invective against legislators. Members of Parliament are censurable if they impute falsehood and scoundrelism to each other in a personal sense, but not censurable for making those imputations in a Parliamentary sense. The theory of this anomaly seems to be, that the affairs of political life cannot be conducted without deceit and baseness, and accordingly that there is no offence in accusing an honourable gentleman of evincing those qualities in labouring at his vocation, that is to say for his country's good, for which it is necessary that he should cheat and deceive.
The law of slander, partially applied to attorneys, ought perhaps to be wholly inapplicable in the case of barristers. If a counsel may suggest to a jury a supposition which he knows to be false, and particularly one, which at the same time tends to criminate some innocent person; and if he is to be allowed to make such a suggestion for his client's benefit, he is allowed to be base and deceitful for the benefit of his client. To charge him with deception and villainy in his character of advocate, is to accuse him of professional zeal; to advantage him, not injure him, in his business. It ought to be lawful to call him a liar and a scoundrel in a forensic sense, as well as in every other.