In UK Law, what is meant by an open letter?
I’m not sure what it’s got to do with UK law but an open letter is just basically a letter meant to be read by a wide audience. They are quite often published in a newspaper so all the readers will read them, to highlight a point and make someone, usually MP or similar find out more about the issue or to raise concerns.
There is no legal definition of an open letter in UK law. There is an ‘open letter of credit’ in US law by which certain monetary funds can be accessed but there is no UK counterpart. The dictionary definition of an ‘open letter’ is basically a letter addressed to an individual (or a corporate identity) which is contemporaneously published so as to be available to the general public, e.g. printed in a newspaper or magazine, printed in leaflet or pamphlet form and distributed and also in the WWW age it may be distributed via email or published on a web page or in a blog. So long as it is intentionally made accessible to the general public by the author it is an open letter and that is the definition that would be applied in a court, should the circumstances arise.
Often in correspondence between solicitors one side will write ‘without prejudice’ – this letter will contain an offer to settle the case, or respond to one, and cannot be shown to the court. If it is, the judge will refuse to read it until the case has concluded. This is known as ‘without prejudice privilege’. The phrase ‘open letter’ is often used to refer to a letter that is not a ‘without prejudice’ letter. So if you’re in a dispute you might receive two letters from a solicitor on the same date. The first will say something like: Here is a copy of our draft claim that we shall issue at the court on Friday. We take this opportunity to bring to your attention that your defence will be unsuccessful because of blah blah blah and we shall recover the debt due in full. But in the same envelope you find another letter, marked ‘without prejudice’ saying: We refer to the contents of our open letter of the same date. Notwithstanding what has been said, our client recognises that there may b
