During the "Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt" trial, it became evident that the court needed to identify what was an "objective historian" in the same vein as the reasonable person, and reminiscent of the standard traditionally used in English law of "the man on the Clapham omnibus". This was necessary so that there would be a legal benchmark to compare and contrast the scholarship of an objective historian against the illegitimate methods employed by David Irving, as before the "Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt" trial, there was no legal precedent for what constituted an objective historian.