Court Opinion

ID: 9731875
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 16:00:38.102895+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:21.688918
License: Public Domain

Concurring Opinion by
Mr. Justice Roberts :
We are here concerned with the interplay between two rules of law applicable in defamation cases: the one year statute of limitations, meant to guard against the presentation of stale claims; and the single publication rule, meant to prevent a multiplicity of suits. Sound reasons of public policy support them both. Yet, if construed in too literal a fashion, the combined effect of these rules can yield a result which is unduly harsh and unsupported by any rational policy considerations.
In the instant case we must decide when the statute of limitations began to run. I quite agree with the majority that neither the wording nor the policy behind either rule “requires a holding that the period of limitations begins to run from the time of the first publication.” However, I do not believe it wise to permit a defamation plaintiff to choose any sale or publication as the one which represents his single cause of action. The dissemination of any one given publication can cover a period of several months or perhaps years; to permit a suit to be based on any one of the many “publications” which can occur during the course of such distribution would defeat the salutary purposes of the one year statute of limitations and the single publication rule.
*230I would hold that the statute begins to run, at the earliest, from the time a publication first reaches the allegedly defamed individual’s community. A distribution which is too small or too far removed from the defamed individual’s community—the size of which would vary with the scope of his public stature—to be truly damaging should hardly be permitted to trigger the statute of limitations.
Applying such a standard to the instant case I believe that the statute of limitations began to run no earlier than March 14, 1964, the date of the first major distribution in Philadelphia.* The prior publication in New York, though quantitatively significant, was just not sufficiently extensive vis a vis the appellant to trigger the statute of limitations. Appellant was not a national figure, and the defamation could only really begin when the material was communicated to his community. Since March 14, 1965, was a Sunday, I. believe that the suit was timely filed and concur in the result.

 In a dated publication tbe date assigned by the publisher might well control the running of the statute, especially where that date might have misled the plaintiff into believing that the statutory period had not yet run.