I mentioned, as other examples of the use by the law of words drawn from
morals, malice, intent, and negligence. It is enough to take malice as
it is used in the law of civil liability for wrongs what we lawyers call
the law of torts--to show that it means something different in law from
what it means in morals, and also to show how the difference has been
obscured by giving to principles which have little or nothing to do with
each other the same name. Three hundred years ago a parson preached a
sermon and told a story out of Fox's Book of Martyrs of a man who
had assisted at the torture of one of the saints, and afterward died,
suffering compensatory inward torment. It happened that Fox was wrong.
The man was alive and chanced to hear the sermon, and thereupon he sued
the parson. Chief Justice Wray instructed the jury that the defendant
was not liable, because the story was told innocently, without malice.
He took malice in the moral sense, as importing a malevolent motive. But
nowadays no one doubts that a man may be liable, without any malevolent
motive at all, for false statements manifestly calculated to inflict
temporal damage. In stating the case in pleading, we still should call
the defendant's conduct malicious; but, in my opinion at least, the
word means nothing about motives, or even about the defendant's attitude
toward the future, but only signifies that the tendency of his conduct
under known circumstances was very plainly to cause the plaintiff
temporal harm.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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