Kammerer v. Sachs

Defendant by this motion attacks the sufficiency of the complaint. It reads in slander and charges defendant with having called the plaintiff a “ bootlegger.” No innuendo is alleged, nor are special damages pleaded. Its sufficiency must, therefore, depend upon whether publicly charging a person to be a bootlegger without more, constitutes slander per se.

If an expression is commonly understood as charging a person with a crime, the use of it is defamatory per se and requires no allegation of special damage. To discover whether the utterance in controversy can be so interpreted, we must…