The equitable doctrine of breach of confidence has been much publicised recently: not only in the news, one might say, but of it, as the legal peg upon which the British Steel Corporation hung their attempt to discover the source of a leak in their own organisation by claiming discovery of that source as an unknown wrongdoer. This is, ironically, a case of the biter bit, for it was not so long ago that it was suggested that journalists’ sources might be protected by the doctrine of breach of confidence. The purpose of this article is to question the validity of that assertion, by attempting to show that breach of confidence operates in a field entirely independent of the rules of evidence.
