Adam v. Ward was a case heard in 1917 by the House of Lords

House of Lords

The House of Lords is the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Like the House of Commons, it meets in the Palace of Westminster....

 concerning the legal theories of qualified privilege

Qualified privilege

The defense of qualified privilege permits persons in positions of authority or trust to make statements or relay or report statements that would be considered slander and libel if made by anyone else...

and that of the constitutional defence. Qualified privilege is "a defence to the publication of defamatory statements which may be false but which warrant protection from an action in defamation because the occasion on which they are made demands that they be made freely with the prospect of litigation removed." The constitutional defence varies from country to country in that it is based on the constitutional law of said country.

The main point of the case concerned the distribution of information; specifically, whether defamatory truths can be published or are unable to be published (as is the case with defamatory lies), and whether such situations are privileged. I.e. if said action were performed out of malice or not, if it were, the case would be that the situation was not privileged and the person undertaking said action did not have the privilege to do so.
Lord Atkinson ruled:

Later uses of the ruling

In Reynolds v Times Newspapers Limited and Others, 1999, Lord Atkinson's quote was cited to define what a privileged occasion is.