Gooch v. Maryland Mechanical Systems, Inc.

GARRITY, Judge.

Over the years, commentators, as well as the judiciary, have attempted to unravel the imbroglio of defamation law as it has developed through early English common law. As one commentator noted:

[T]he English common law of defamation slowly grew into a forest of complexities, overgrown with anomalies, inconsistencies and perverse rigidities, it became thicket-ed with brambled traps for innocent defendants, crisscrossed with circuitous paths and dead ends for seriously wronged plaintiffs, and enshrouded in a “fog of fictions, inferences, and presumptions." This perplexing creation…