Can you defame a profession?

Question

Suppose someone publishes the statement "All lawyers are thieves." Obviously, this is not true; there most likely are some lawyers who are also thieves, but certainly not all. Would it be possible for any lawyer to sue this person for defamation, either individually or in a class action?

Answer 1

united-states

https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/who-can-sue-defamation

One of the elements of defamation is that the statement must be "of and concerning" the plaintiff.

Accordingly, defamatory statements about a group or class of people generally are not actionable by individual members of that group or class. There are two exceptions to this general rule that exist when:

• the group or class is so small that the statements are reasonably understood to refer to the individual in question; or
• the circumstances make it reasonable to conclude that the statement refers particularly to the individual in question.

See Restatement (2d) of Torts, § 564A (1977).

The article suggests that the cutoff for a "small group" is about 25 people.

(They cite an interesting example from 1952: Neiman-Marcus v. Lait, 13 F.R.D. 311 (S.D.N.Y. 1952). A store had a sales staff of 25 male and 382 female employees. The defendant published a book asserting that "most of" the male sales staff were homosexual, which I suppose was per se defamatory in 1952, and that the female staff generally were prostitutes. The court held that the men had been defamed but the women had not.)

So since there are more than 25 lawyers in the world, "all lawyers are thieves" would not defame any individual lawyer.

I don't believe that class action suits for defamation are permitted at all. I can't currently find a source for this, but I also can't find any report of such a case having been heard.

Answer 2

I have the impression that certain professions are more likely to sue when faced with criticism (I hope that statement doesn't get me sued). So I searched for cases involving chiropractors and found an article about the British Chiropractors Association suing Simon Singh for libel.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/feb/22/simon-singh-british-chiropractic-association

The outcome was the Singh prevailed but apparently the BCA had legal advice that they had a valid cause to sue (apparently it was "iron clad") so it seems likely that given different circumstances it would be possible to win an anti-defamation case on behalf of a profession in the UK. Note this case was 10 years ago but I don't think there have been substantial changes to the libel laws in the UK in that time.