Josh Lewison recently featured in [2024] Private Client Business Issue 3 for his article on ‘Fraudulent Calumny—The Unanswered Questions’.

Over the past ten years or so, the plea of fraudulent calumny has emerged as a mainstay of contentious probate claims, almost on a par with testamentary capacity, want of knowledge and approval and undue influence. But for all its popularity, the precise components of fraudulent calumny, its relationship with other kinds of fraud and the remedies available have yet to be worked out. This article started as an attempt to fill in some of the gaps, but in fact concludes that fraudulent calumny entered the legal lexicon as a construct of textbook writers and is only an example of a more general plea of fraud.

Read the full article here.