High Court of Australia

To trace, comprehensively, the origins of the so-called single publication rule, as it has come to be understood in the United States, may neither be possible nor productive. It is, however, useful to notice some of the more important steps that have been taken in its development. Treating each sale of a defamatory book or newspaper as a separate publication giving rise to a separate cause of action might be thought to present difficulties of pleading and proof. Following early English authority holding that separate counts alleging each sale need not be pleaded in the declaration, American courts accepted that, where the defamatory matter was published in a book or newspaper, each publication need not be pleaded separately. Similarly, proof of general distribution of a newspaper was accepted as sufficient proof of there having been a number of separate publications. It was against this background that there emerged, at least in some American States by the late nineteenth century, the rule that a plaintiff could bring only one action against a defendant to recover damages for all the publications that had by then been made of an offending publication. The expression "one publication" or, later, "single publication" was first commonly used in this context.