03/02/2020 Stocker v Stocker [2019] UKSC 17 (3 April 2019) 21. Mrs Stocker had pleaded that her statements were substantially true and that she was therefore entitled to rely on the defence of justification. The judge dealt with that plea in para 54 of his judgment: “The defendant has proved some justification for the words which she used in the Facebook postings. The claimant did commit an offence against her on 23 March 2003, at least common assault. He was arrested three times. There were ‘gun issues’. He had made threats, though not of immediate violence against her. But she has not met the sting of the postings that the claimant was a dangerous man. The impression given by the postings to the ordinary reader was a significant and distorting overstatement of what had in fact occurred.” The Court of Appeal 22. At para 17 of her judgment, Sharp LJ in the Court of Appeal said this about the use of dictionaries as a means of deciding the meaning to be given to a statement alleged to be defamatory: “The use of dictionaries does not form part of the process of determining the natural and ordinary meaning of words, because what matters is the impression conveyed by the words to the ordinary reader when they are read, and it is this that the judge must identify. As it happened however no harm was done in this case. The judge told counsel during the course of submissions that he had looked at the OED definitions and what they said, so the parties had the opportunity to address him about it; the judge, as he then said, merely used the dictionary definitions as a check, and no more; those definitions were in substance the rival ones contended for by the parties, and in the event, the judge’s ultimate reasoning, not dependent on dictionaries, was sound.” 23. The suggestion that the judge told counsel “in the course of submissions” that he had looked at the dictionary definition may mislead. On the first day of the trial, before any evidence had been given, counsel for Mr Stocker, Mr Barca QC, had suggested to Mitting J that no time would be saved by asking him to deliver a preliminary ruling on meaning. The judge replied that he had “a preliminary opinion about it” which he was willing to disclose. Shortly thereafter, he suggested that counsel should look at the Oxford English Dictionary definitions and said, “You might from that gain the primary and secondary definition and fit it (sic) into the context of a message that he ‘tried’ to do something”. All of this occurred before the judge heard any argument about meanings. This suggests that, contrary to Sharp LJ’s view, the judge was not using the dictionary definitions as a cross-check. Plainly, he regarded those definitions as comprehensive of the possible meanings of the statement, “he tried to strangle me”. 24. Sharp LJ’s statement that Mitting J merely used the dictionary definitions as a check may have been based on his comment in para 36 of his judgment that the authorities do not “prohibit reference to an authoritative English dictionary such as the Oxford English Dictionary to confirm the meaning in ordinary usage of a single English word”. I do not construe this statement as signifying that the judge was using the dictionary definitions as a cross-check and, indeed, neither in his judgment nor in his exchanges with counsel, does he ever use the expression, “check”. Given that Mitting J had consulted the dictionary before the trial began and commended consideration of it to counsel, it seems to me plain that, far from using the definitions as a check, what the judge did was https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKSC/2019/17.html 6/16