Definition
To publish, in law, means to communicate or make known to at least one person other than the author or originator. The legal meaning varies significantly by context, and three distinct uses appear across the corpus:
1. DEFAMATION/TORT LAW: Publication is the act of communicating a defamatory statement to any third party — even a single person. No mass distribution is required. The moment a statement is transmitted to someone other than the subject, publication is complete. This is the most technically precise legal use of the term.
2. WILLS AND PROBATE: To publish a will historically meant to formally declare or announce to attesting witnesses that the document being signed is the testator's last will and testament. This act of publication was, under older Statute of Frauds-derived requirements, a distinct formal step in valid will execution. Many modern statutes have relaxed or eliminated the formal publication requirement, but the term persists in older forms and commentary.
3. GENERAL LEGAL USE: To publish means to make officially known — to promulgate, proclaim, or give notice of a law, order, decree, or other legal instrument. In this sense, publication is a precondition to a law's taking effect or to legal notice being established.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To issue printed or digital work for distribution or sale; to announce to the public; to disseminate a message via media or platform; to have one's work accepted by a publisher.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To make known to mankind generally; to divulge a private transaction; to proclaim a law or edict; to make known by posting or by reading in church.
The gap is significant. In ordinary English, publishing implies broad dissemination — a book, a newspaper, a public announcement. In defamation law, the technical threshold is far lower: a whisper to a single colleague satisfies publication. Researchers working with historical sources should also watch for the will-execution sense, which is entirely absent from common usage today but pervades older probate materials.
Common Confusion
Publication in defamation is frequently misread by modern researchers through the lens of common usage. A source that says a statement was "not published" may mean it was not broadly distributed — but under tort doctrine, communication to even one third party constitutes publication. The two meanings operate on entirely different scales. Similarly, the probate sense of publication (a formal oral declaration at will execution) is easy to conflate with the general sense of making something known, but it carries specific formality requirements that general "making known" does not.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
General publication: Distribution or communication of a work or statement to the public at large, or to an indeterminate class of persons.
Limited publication: Communication to a select group for a limited purpose, without intent to allow general dissemination. Historically relevant in copyright law, where limited publication did not forfeit common-law copyright protections. Modern copyright law has largely displaced this distinction, but it appears frequently in pre-1978 materials.
Publication of a will: The formal declaration by a testator, in the presence of witnesses, that an instrument is their last will. A discrete act with specific legal consequences under older execution formalities.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a high-frequency false friend in the corpus. The same word carries materially different meanings in tort, probate, copyright, administrative, and general legal contexts — and those meanings do not simply scale up or down from each other; they are structurally different.
In defamation research, never assume historical sources use "publication" to mean mass dissemination. The one-person threshold for publication has deep common-law roots and will appear without explanation in older cases and treatises.
In probate research, the publication requirement for wills is a procedural trap. Sources from before the mid-twentieth century frequently treat publication as a mandatory separate act from signing and attestation. Many modern statutes have merged or eliminated it, so the same term means different things depending on the date and jurisdiction of the source.
In copyright research, the general/limited publication distinction is critical for any work created before January 1, 1978. General publication without proper notice could forfeit copyright protection under the 1909 Act regime. This distinction disappeared from operative law after the 1976 Act took effect, but it governs the status of vast quantities of material in the historical corpus.
In administrative and legislative contexts, publication typically means official promulgation — the mechanism by which legal instruments acquire binding effect. Researchers tracing when a regulation or ordinance became effective must confirm which publication event the law treats as the trigger.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's entry is minimal: "Primarily it means to make known," citing a New Jersey case. This captures the core but offers no differentiation across legal contexts — a notable gap given how consequentially the term varies. Bouvier's brevity here is itself informative: the foundational meaning is simply communication, and the doctrinal elaborations (the defamation threshold, the probate formality, the copyright distinction) are built on top of that simple core. The citation to 54 N.J.L. 111 grounds the primary meaning in case law without specifying context, which is consistent with Bouvier's general-use approach. Researchers should not treat Bouvier's silence on the will-execution and copyright senses as evidence those senses were unrecognized — they are simply handled under other headings in the historical dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
The publication requirement for will execution varies significantly by jurisdiction and era. Some states eliminated formal publication as a separate requirement early; others retained it well into the twentieth century. For defamation, the single-publication rule (which treats mass media publication as one act of publication, not a separate act for each reader) was adopted unevenly across states and is jurisdictionally variable.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Defamation (for the tort-law publication threshold and single-publication rule); Wills and Testaments (for the probate execution formality); Notice (for the administrative and legislative promulgation sense).