Definition
In legal usage, scandal has two distinct but related meanings:
1. General defamatory meaning: Defamatory reports or rumors; slanderous talk uttered recklessly or maliciously about a person. In this sense, scandal denotes harmful aspersion—spoken or circulated matter that damages reputation without necessarily rising to actionable defamation.
2. Pleading and procedural meaning: In equity practice and formal pleading, scandal refers to any allegation in a bill, answer, or other pleading that is unbecoming the dignity of the court to hear, contrary to good manners, or that charges a person with a crime not necessary to be shown in the cause. A scandalous pleading may be stricken on motion. The test is not merely offensiveness but superfluity combined with improper imputation—an allegation that is both unnecessary to the legal claim and injurious to a person's character.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An incident or event that disgraces or damages the reputation of the persons or organization involved; widespread moral outrage over an offense to decency; defamatory talk or gossip.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Offense caused or experienced; reproach or disgrace called forth by what is regarded as wrong or criminal; reproachful aspersion or opprobrious censure; defamatory talk uttered recklessly or maliciously.
The common meanings converge closely with the general legal meaning, but miss the procedural dimension entirely. In legal research, the most technically significant use of the term is the pleading doctrine—a context in which "scandal" is a formal ground for striking or excepting to pleadings, independent of whether the matter would be actionable defamation outside court. A researcher encountering the word in equity procedure is reading a term of art, not a rhetorical complaint.
Common Confusion
Scandal is sometimes conflated with impertinence in pleading. The two are related but distinct grounds for striking matter from a pleading. Impertinence refers to matter that is irrelevant to the issues in the cause. Scandal refers to matter that is not only unnecessary but also reflects injuriously on a party or third person. Both grounds may exist simultaneously—an allegation can be both impertinent and scandalous—but an allegation may be impertinent without being scandalous, and historically courts distinguished them. Researchers examining motions to strike in equity proceedings should look for both terms and understand that courts sometimes treated them as a paired phrase ("scandalous and impertinent") without carefully separating the doctrines.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers should approach this term with structural pattern awareness: it is a multi-meaning term with a general defamatory sense and a distinct procedural sense, and the procedural sense dominates in equity and chancery sources.
In equity pleading materials, particularly English chancery practice and early American equity courts, scandal is a technical ground for a motion to strike or expunge. Burrill and the chancery practice treatises he cites (Wyatt's Practical Register, Daniell's Chancery Practice, Story's Equity Pleading) are the primary doctrinal sources for this procedural doctrine. Researchers working with pre-merger equity practice—before the Federal Rules merged law and equity in 1938—will encounter this usage frequently in motions practice, interlocutory proceedings, and pleading challenges.
In modern federal and state practice, the equivalent mechanism survives as a motion to strike "scandalous" matter under rules modeled on Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(f), which permits striking "any redundant, immaterial, impertinent, or scandalous matter" from a pleading. The word persists in the Rules, but modern courts rarely engage with its historical equity pedigree. Researchers comparing modern Rule 12(f) practice to historical equity pleading should not assume the standards are identical.
The general defamatory meaning appears in older sources as something close to slander or libel without precise technical differentiation. In sources predating the firm separation of slander and libel as distinct torts, "scandal" could encompass either. Researchers using Bouvier or early Black's should treat the general definition as a rough gloss rather than a precise doctrinal category.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical sources agree on the core of both meanings. Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Bouvier align on the defamatory/reputational sense. Burrill provides the most technically precise treatment of the pleading doctrine, citing Wyatt's Practical Register and Daniell's Chancery Practice for the proposition that scandal consists in alleging anything unbecoming the court's dignity, contrary to good manners, or charging a crime not necessary to the cause.
Black's adds a useful amplification that any unnecessary allegation bearing cruelly on a person's character qualifies—the entry appears truncated in both editions at that point, but the principle is clear: necessity to the cause is the pivotal test. If the allegation is needed to establish a legal element, it is not scandalous even if it reflects badly on someone. If it is gratuitous, it is.
Anderson's Dictionary of Law does not appear to have a substantive entry for this term in the excerpted materials.
Rapalje & Lawrence's entry is not responsive to this term.
Notably, none of the historical sources engage with the question of how "scandal" in the pleading sense interacts with privilege doctrine or with the emerging distinction between libel and slander—a gap that becomes relevant when a party argues that matter stricken as scandalous might also have been actionable outside court. Modern sources must be consulted for that interface.
Jurisdictional Note
The pleading doctrine survives in modern federal practice under Rule 12(f) and in most state procedural analogues, but the substantive standard for what qualifies as "scandalous" varies in application. Federal courts generally require that the matter be both irrelevant and prejudicial—a stricter standard than the historical equity test, which did not always require irrelevance. Researchers should not assume historical chancery precedents map cleanly onto modern Rule 12(f) motions.