Torts related to Reputation (Defamation) & Personal Relations

A college group chat in Navi Mumbai carries a screenshot: “Rohit took bribes to fix the internal marks.” It is false, and within an hour half the batch has seen it. Rohit has lost nothing you could put on a bill, but his name has been damaged in front of the people whose opinion he cares about. Does the law treat a damaged reputation as property, as a personal right, or as something else? And what can the sender say in his defence if he thought the story was true?

In two minutes

Defamation is the publication, to someone other than the plaintiff, of a false statement that lowers him in the estimation of right-thinking people; libel is in permanent form, slander is spoken, and the main defences are justification (truth), fair comment and privilege.

The rest of this chapter

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