Day 263 - 14 Jun 96 - Page 26
1
2 MR. RAMPTON: My Lord, can I try and shorten matters? Perhaps
3 I can deal with this last question, the post-September
4 question, first. This arises because an application has
5 been made for sight of documents which are privileged. If
6 there were any doubt (which I do not accept there is any
7 doubt) whether the notes or reports submitted to
8 Mrs. Brinley-Codd before issue of writ were privileged,
9 there surely cannot be any doubt about evidence gathered by
10 the inquiry agents after the writ was issued.
11
12 It may very well be -- I do not know, I would have to
13 look -- that reports submitted after issue of the writ
14 contain material which is relevant in a general sense to
15 issues in the action. In fact, that may very well be. The
16 argument before your Lordship is whether, by submitting
17 evidence in relation to the pre-writ period, one meeting a
18 week after the writ, evidence in relation to the pre-writ
19 period, in relation to the question "Did the Defendants
20 publish the words complained of", and to the further
21 question which is raised by way of defence, "Did the
22 Plaintiffs consent to those publications", then I assert
23 what I asserted yesterday, that the matters covered in the
24 post-writ reports are not relevant to either of those
25 questions and they are, therefore, irrelevant to the
26 question of waiver, which is the question your Lordship has
27 principally to decide, if you should come to the conclusion
28 that the reports or the notes are, in principle, the
29 subject of privilege.
30
31 MR. JUSTICE BELL: It may be that you do not have to concern
32 yourself about this, if I were to come to the view that the
33 notes and reports were privileged and that there had been
34 no waiver about the transaction in respect of the waiver
35 bit was a particular meeting or a particular event. But if
36 we put privilege completely on one side for a moment,
37 because you started off by arguing that they were not
38 relevant, anyway.
39
40 MR. RAMPTON: I specified the questions to which I said that
41 they were irrelevant. If your Lordship remembered,
42 I proposed, I think it was four; I cannot remember what
43 they were now; I could look back at the transcript. But
44 I think I proposed four questions relating to the issue of
45 publication and to the issue of consent.
46
47 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes.
48
49 MR. RAMPTON: As I saw it, and as I still see it, the question
50 of waiver -- and I do not resile from this one bit -- is
51 confined to the issues raised by those four questions,
52 unless it be proposed that by waiving a privilege -----
53
54 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I am not at all on, at the moment, privilege
55 or waiver.
56
57 MR. RAMPTON: I understand that.
58
59 MR. JUSTICE BELL: It is just that if I say they are not
60 relevant anyway, I need not even concern myself with that.
