The Rookie and the silk: learning the 'ordinary reasonable person' in defamation law

This article examines the way in which the law and lawyers determine the extent to which a publication is defamatory. That issue is decided by estimating the response to the material of a hypothetical audience commonly personified in the ‘ordinary reasonable person’. By means of empirical research into how the public and practising lawyers perceive this imaginary being, the paper asks first whether the ‘ordinary reasonable person’ bears any relationship to public opinion and secondly the extent to which ‘he’ is an imagining of the legal mind, part of legal doctrine that can be learned through legal education and practice.