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A JUDGE has found philanthropist Niall Mellon was defamed by a daily newspaper in a report claiming he had sacked a personal assistant shortly before she was due to give birth.

Yesterday Judge Alison Lindsay at the Circuit Civil Court ordered that the publishers of the Irish Daily Mail , Associated Newspapers Ltd, publish a correction and apologise to Mr Mellon after finding he had been defamed in an article that appeared in March last year. The article reported a claim by Helen O’Connor that she had been dismissed after asking him for financial help.

The judge said the newspaper had “no defence” to the action brought by Mr Mellon, who claimed the article contained words that were untrue and inaccurate.

Mr Mellon (44), a property developer from Rathfarnham, Dublin, had brought proceedings under the 2009 Defamation Act arising out of the report claiming he had sacked Ms O’Connor only two weeks before she was due to give birth.

In January 1844, Charles Dickens launched a copyright suit in the Court of Chancery against printers and publishers Richard Egan Lee and John Haddock.

Dickens’ A Christmas Carol had been published on December 19, 1843, and not quite three weeks later, on January 6th, Lee & Haddock’s version, “re-originated” by Henry Hewitt, had appeared for sale under the title A Christmas Ghost Story. An outraged Dickens instructed his solicitor to “stop the Vagabonds” at once. Over a whirlwind three days, his bill of complaint was filed, and an interim injunction sought and obtained. …

Judge Knight Bruce, before whom the motion to dissolve the interim injunction was heard on January 18th … opined: “The defendant has printed and published a novel, of which the fable, the persons, the names of persons, the characters, the age and time, and scene and country, are wholly the same. The style of language in which the story is told is in some instances identical, and in all similar.” He concluded that, in his view, the defendants’ publication was “plainly colourable,” and, on that basis, he upheld the injunction.

This post is from Kate Sutherlands great new blog, law.arts.culture, a blog devoted to exploration of the intersection of law and the arts.

Contract parties are free to structure their relations as they see fit, but within limits set by statute or by the courts. That raises the question, does it make sense to state in a contract that you’re complying with a given legal requirement?

… To explore this, I considered the phrase as liquidated damages and not as a penalty, which obviously enough occurs in provisions in which the parties, instead of having actual damages determined in the event of a dispute, specify what damages a party is to pay on breach of a given obligation. … I recommend that you do more than just trot out as liquidated damages and not as a penalty. It’s sufficiently rote and terse as to constitute jargon. Because drafters and their clients don’t give it much thought, courts would be entitled not to pay much attention to it either.

Here’s a more meaningful way of saying the same thing:

Acme acknowledges that the actual damages likely to result from breach of this section X are difficult to estimate on the date of this agreement and would be difficult for Widgetco to prove. The parties intend that Acme’s payment of the Liquidated Damages Amount would serve to compensate Widgetco for any breach by Acme of its obligations under this section X, and they do not intend for it to serve as punishment for any such breach by Acme.