Walker v. Tribune Co.

• Decision Date: 14 February 1887
• Citation: 29 F. 827
• Parties: WALKER v. TRIBUNE CO.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Northern District of Illinois

29 F. 827

WALKER v. TRIBUNE CO.

United States Circuit Court, N.D. Illinois.

February 14, 1887

A. H Walker, for himself.

A. S Trude, for defendant.

BLODGETT J.

This is a demurrer to a declaration filed by the plaintiff in this case. The declaration avers, in substance, that plaintiff is and has been for several years past, a lawyer by profession and the author of a text-book upon the law of patents, and also the author of a pamphlet entitled 'The Paine Bribery Case and the United States Senate;' that defendant, intending to cause it to be suspected and believed that plaintiff was a man of crude, ill digested, ill considered, and wild ideas and aims, and to be supposed to be without skill, tact, adequate information, or common sense, on the fourth day of September, 1886, in this district, did wrongfully, falsely, and maliciously cause to be composed, printed, and published, on the editorial page of the Chicago Tribune of that date, the following false and defamatory language concerning the plaintiff, and concerning said pamphlet; that is to say: 'The pamphlet on the Paine Bribery Case and the United States Senate, by Albert H. Walker, is plainly the effusion of a crank;'-- meaning thereby to publicly characterize the plaintiff as a 'crank,' and thus to publicly impute to him sundry qualities, aims, and methods highly inconsistent with usefulness and success as a lawyer and author, whereby plaintiff has been greatly prejudiced in his credit and reputation, and caused to be considered an unreliable and injudicious person, and destitute of those qualities on which the earnings of a lawyer or a serious author depend; and has been greatly vexed and mortified, and has been deprived of divers great earnings which would otherwise have accrued to him in his professional duties, and divers great royalties which otherwise would have been paid to him on sales of his books.

The demurrer is general and special, the grounds of the general demurrer being (1) that the word 'crank' is not in itself defamatory or actionable, and there is no averment or innuendo in the declaration stating that the defendant's meaning, or the sense in which the word was used, was such as to make it defamatory, or imply any libelous intention; (2) that the pamphlet referred to in the defendant's criticism as 'plainly the effusion of a crank' should have been set out, so that the court could judge whether the language used by the defendant in regard to it was justified from the tenor of the pamphlet itself.

The ground for special demurrer is that there is no averment of special damage or injury to the plaintiff by reason of the alleged defamatory matter.

In regard to the first point stated, it must, I think, be conceded that to call a person a 'crank' is not of itself actionable. It is not a word which, by its common meaning in the English language, imports...