Abstract
According to the House of Lords decision in Campbell v MGN Ltd, a misuse
of private information claim may succeed even though public interest
expression is at stake. The post-Campbell jurisprudence, however, does not
reflect this central tenet. Cases are not determined by balancing the weight
of each claim but by a binary approach in which claims succeed or fail
depending on whether public interest expression is present or not. By
charting this development, this article argues that a greater sense of
proportionality would be achieved if cases were decided not by the quality
of expression but by the harm caused by it. By re-imagining Campbell as a
four-part test, it will show how the current paternalistic and idiosyncratic
influences on decision-making may be reduced significantly.