Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 8.djvu/410

394 394 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. body — certain statements about employees, reports to stockhold- ers or to subscribers of a commercial agency, charges against a municipal officer, etc. — call for an adjustment of the limits allowable to such self-seeking efforts ; the doctrine of malice is incidentally involved. (2) In the interests of the community at large, a certain freedom of criticism, not as liberal as in the pre- ceding class of cases, is to be permitted in matters of literature, public behavior, etc. ; a similar policy being involved. (/) Injuries to societary relations. Mr. Justice HOLMES has lately shown ^ how the general question here is one of the proper limits allowable to the needs of industrial competition and of general social intercourse, with reference to the harm to individuals therein necessarily involved. The grouping, for this purpose, into (i) Domestic, (2) Contractual, and (3) Sundry Voluntary relations has already been explained. It is unnecessary here to suggest the different detailed problems that arise, except to call attention to the smaller degree of liberty allowed for interference with the more solid and definite relations of the first two classes as com- pared with the third. In the third class we find, on the whole, a general agreement, on the one hand, to make no allowances in favor of violent, fraudulent, or defamatory interference, and on the other, to exempt from action any peaceable individual suasion. Between these extremes the principles are as yet being worked out, the problem being to adjust the conflicting requirements of the general social needs and of individual security, and to define the place where the former shall not be allowed to override the latter. It must be again noted that these different policies of Excuse, above rehearsed, may apply to any of the legally recognized harms. The doctrine of consent or of assumption of risk, the needs of the administration of justice, the requirements of social convenience, may or may not justify a trespass, a slander, a nuisance, a boycott. Not every form of Excuse, of course, is applicable to each kind of legal harm ; but each form of policy exists for itself an-d not in yoke with a specific kind of harm, though its result, when applied to different harms, may not be the same. This seems to show that the natural line of cleavage is a horizontal rather than a vertical one, that the general grouping should be not e. g. (i) Battery, (2) Responsibility for it, (3) Excuses for it, and so on for other kinds of harm, but rather (i) Harm in general, the varieties ; (2) Responsi- 1 8 Harv. Law Rev., pp. 1-14.