The groundbreaking case of Campbell v MGN Ltd was the topic of this article. The impact of the ruling was analyzed by Michael Tugendhat from the High Court of England and Wales, looking at the developments in common law, and what it was like to practice law before it. 

In the aforementioned case, the supermodel Naomi Campbell sued The Mirror for revealing details of her drug addiction treatment at Narcotics Anonymous, including covert photographs – and the House of Lords ruled 3-2 that the newspaper could reveal that she was a drug addict (she had publicly denied this, so this was a factual correction), but had no right to publish therapy details or private photographs of her in treatment, as it breached her privacy rights.

The three questions that the author focuses on are the laws of privacy before the case, the development of the common law with the case, and what the case stands for now. Before Campbell, copyright, defamation, and trespass to goods were all invoked to protect privacy by prohibiting the disclosure of private information.

In the 1970s, there were cases like Campbell where a breach of confidence, in all those cases that the author recalls, there was a confidential relationship between the defendant and the subject of the information, and there might have been cases where confidential information was revealed by a force of nature – like a diary being blown in the wind. Often, the clients in past cases were persons of note, but not always.

The changes in common law that preceded Campbell were necessary because of societal changes, such as the development in photographic and audio technology, and the digital revolution – things are no longer stored in paper but in computer data storage. High-speed photocopiers were also an advancement of note, and later, the mobile phone.

Now that 20 years have passed from the judgement, it bears remembering that the judges in the case emphasized that they were not developing the common law in it – rather, they were in their own view simply upholding the law as it had been over the years. Also, Lord Keith noted that commercial confidential information and private confidential information are two different things.

Finally, the judges in the Campbell case, and similar cases, have argued powerfully that “privacy lies at the heart of liberty in a modern state. A proper degree of privacy is essential for the well-being and development of an individual” – as Lord Nicholls put it. This has been long rejected by many journalists in favor of free transmission of even sensitive information.

The article “Privacy before Campbell” by Michael Tugendhat is in Journal of Media 

Law. (Free abstract).

Picture: (Naomi Campbell) Diane von Fürstenberg Spring-Summer 2014 07 (cropped).jpg

By Wikimedia Commons.