A Twitter spat involving law lecturers has reached the High Court in a claim with ‘multiple causes of action’ including harassment, defamation, and breach of data rights.
James Wilson v James Mendelsohn & Anor centres around a Facebook post originally publushed in 2018, which includes a photo of James Wilson, a law lecturer and non-practising solicitor, and was republished in 2020 as part of a Twitter thread. The judgment said the thread concerned antisemitism, the state of Israel and criticism of Israel by the left and began with a ‘quote tweet’.
Wilson entered the online conversation with a comment and link to an article in the London Review of Books. Master Davison, in providing background to the case, said: ‘The claimant’s participation in the conversation was not welcomed and there followed a Twitter “spat” in which the other participants…castigated his stance and his reference to and reliance on the LRB article.’
Wilson’s court fight includes claims of libel, misuse of private information, harassment and breach of data rights. James Mendelsohn, a law lecturer, and Edward Cantor, a former restaurateur, who the claims are against, applied to strike out the claims or grant a reverse summary judgment in their favour.
Master Davison found Wilson’s claims of harassment would have a real prospect of success. He said that ‘eight tweets seem to satisfy the requirement of persistent conduct’ and added the tweets ‘at least arguably, “crossed the boundary between that which is unattractive, even unreasonable, and conduct which is oppressive and unacceptable”’.
The harassment claim against Cantor was dismissed. Master Davison described it as the ‘knockdown blow to the claim’ as Cantor had tweeted the screenshot of the Facebook post on only one occasion. He added: ‘Although the third defendant published further tweets, none of these, it seems to me, could be characterised as going beyond the merely offensive. They were designed to goad and taunt the claimant.’
Failing the application ‘save [the] very limited extent’, Davison said: ‘Ms Grossman [for Mendelsohn and Cantor] also submitted that it was undesirable to have a claim comprising multiple causes of action which were merely different ways of saying the same thing. As a general proposition, I agree. And there might be cases where causes of action could on this ground be removed under the Jameel principle or (more likely) as part of general case management. But this is a power which would be exercised very sparingly.
‘Litigants are prima facie entitled to deploy the causes of action at their disposal and there are often legitimate reasons to do so. To give just one example pertinent to this case, the claimant might lose his libel claim if the defendants proved the truth of the publications; but truth would not be an answer (or certainly not a complete answer) to the claims in harassment or misuse of private information. This is not a case for the sort of “pruning” which Ms Grossman advocated.’
Wilson's case can now continue to trial.
