"The Fox News star Tucker Carlson said on Monday evening that he would leave on a vacation, starting immediately, days after a writer on his program, Blake Neff, resigned over racist, sexist and misogynist messages..."

"... that Mr. Neff published pseudonymously on an online message board. Mr. Carlson told viewers that he would return to his show next week and described the vacation as 'long planned,' suggesting that his time off had been set before Mr. Neff was revealed on Friday as the author of the offensive posts.... Mr. Neff... resigned last week after Fox News learned of his activity on AutoAdmit, an online forum popular with law students. There, Mr. Neff had written messages that denigrated African-Americans, Asian-Americans and women.... 'What Blake wrote anonymously was wrong,' [Carlson] told viewers. 'We don’t endorse those words. They have no connection to the show. It is wrong to attack people for qualities they cannot control.'... Mr. Carlson, who has used his platform to denounce a so-called cancel culture that he says stymies free speech, appended a somewhat defiant note. He said that Mr. Neff 'has paid a very heavy price' for his behavior, 'but we should also point out to the ghouls now beating their chests in triumph at the destruction of a young man, that self-righteousness also has its costs... We are all human.... When we pretend we are holy, we are lying. When we pose as blameless in order to hurt other people, we are committing the gravest sin of all, and we will be punished for it, there’s no question."

From "Tucker Carlson to Take ‘Long-Planned’ Vacation After Writer’s Resignation/On his Monday evening show, the Fox News host said racist and sexist posts by one of his writers, Blake Neff, were 'wrong,' while castigating his detractors as 'ghouls'" (NYT).

I hope this "ghouls" terminology catches on. It was only 3 days ago that I myself said: "I've been seeing this Steven Pinker story out of the corner of my eye for a while. I don't even know what the cancel ghouls even say that he did wrong. I just assume they're crying wolf."

IN THE COMMENTS: Wince links to the fascination with the word "ghoul" in "Gangs of New York":

About that AutoAdmit litigation.

The latest.

... Anthony Ciolli, a University of Pennsylvania Law School graduate and former chief education director at AutoAdmit, can press ahead with his lawsuit against Stanford Law School professor Mark Lemley, who worked as counsel at San Francisco-based Keker & Van Nest, two Yale Law School students and others.

Ciolli's lawsuit claims that he was wrongly included as a defendant in a case brought in June 2007 by the two law students, who alleged that AutoAdmit defamed them on its discussion board. He also claims that Boston-based Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge rescinded its offer of full-time employment because of the alleged connection between him and the statements about the women.....

Named as defendants in his suit are Heide Iravani and Brittan Heller, the former Yale law students; and ReputationDefender, a public relations firm that represented the students. Also named are Lemley; Keker & Van Nest; the Los Angeles-based law firm Rosen & Associates; and attorney David Rosen. Lemley and Rosen were attorneys for the students.

Ciolli's lawsuit alleges wrongful initiation of civil proceedings, abuse of process, libel, slander, false-light invasion of privacy, tortious interference with contract and unauthorized use of name or likeness.

A huge reason not to sue someone: He'll sue you back. How awful!

ATL Idol judging.

The finale is up.

And if I were a Yale Law student, I'd get some Stanford lawprof lawyer to out commenter #26.

When you set out to destroy someone's good name, are you responsible to the other people who happen to have that name?

Matthew C. Ryan is not the most unusual name. It's not unique, but it's also not John Smith — a name so common that when you hear something bad about someone with that name, you don't assume it relates to any particular person with that name. If you hear Matthew C. Ryan, you may very well assume it's the Matthew C. Ryan you know. This is especially so when the name is also tied to a specific place — in this case, the University of Texas in Austin, Texas.

A Google search for Matthew C. Ryan today yields a mere 797 hits, and this is after all the stories telling us one of the names behind the pseudonyms in the lawsuit brought by the Yale law students who had some mean, nasty thing written about them on the AutoAdmit website. Surely, before the release of the name, a Google search would show that it is surprisingly rare worldwide and that there is another Matthew C. Ryan at the the University of Texas. But they sent the name out anyway, and the damage has been done.

Now, is that a tort? The lawprof lawyer who is representing the plaintiffs is enthused about the expansion of tort liability for speech that damages reputation or causes emotional distress, so it will be sad if he can't enjoy the expansive theories of tort law that may come in the form of a lawsuit filed by Matthew C. Ryan. But the pleasure is there for fans of irony and poetic justice. To top it all off, Matthew C. Ryan is a lawprof lawyer. Sweet!

Yes, you could say a lawprof lawyer should have a thick skin and tough it out. Hey, I thought the Yale law students would do better to show the world — and their future clients and employers — that they have thick skins and can tough it out. But they brought a lawsuit. They wanted to show that there are consequences for the things you say that hurt people, consequences that courts should enforce.

Well, then.

Lawsuits. They breed.

:D.

:(.

"Trolling is basically Internet eugenics... I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed."

"Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put these people in the oven!"

The New York Times wants you to know there are some bad people on the internet. You know what? There are some bad people walking the streets of your home town.

The question is: What do you want to do about it?

Here's the conclusionish stuff at the end of Mattathias Schwartz's fascinating article. (He embedded himself with evil trolls and lived to tell the tale.)

Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”?

(Hang on. I'm going to do a separate post about the use of the word "eristic.")

Is the effort to control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech?

One promising answer comes from the computer scientist Jon Postel, now known as “god of the Internet” for the influence he exercised over the emerging network. In 1981, he formulated what’s known as Postel’s Law: “Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.” Originally intended to foster “interoperability,” the ability of multiple computer systems to understand one another, Postel’s Law is now recognized as having wider applications. To build a robust global network with no central authority, engineers were encouraged to write code that could “speak” as clearly as possible yet “listen” to the widest possible range of other speakers, including those who do not conform perfectly to the rules of the road. The human equivalent of this robustness is a combination of eloquence and tolerance — the spirit of good conversation. Trolls embody the opposite principle. They are liberal in what they do and conservative in what they construe as acceptable behavior from others. You, the troll says, are not worthy of my understanding; I, therefore, will do everything I can to confound you.

This is extremely useful to know. Remember that principle. People who want the most freedom for themselves and the least for you. They're not just the trolls of the internet. They're everywhere. Defend yourself by identifying them and continuing to claim a good amount of freedom for yourself.

[T]echnology reduces the social barriers that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the initial trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly — a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well.

It's human nature.

So far, despite all this discord, the Internet’s system of civil machines has proved more resilient than anyone imagined. As early as 1994, the head of the Internet Society warned that spam “will destroy the network.” The news media continually present the online world as a Wild West infested with villainous hackers, spammers and pedophiles. And yet the Internet is doing very well for a frontier town on the brink of anarchy. Its traffic is expected to quadruple by 2012. To say that trolls pose a threat to the Internet at this point is like saying that crows pose a threat to farming.

Ha ha. Great. Exactly.

So can we have maximum freedom of speech or do we need legal remedies for the really bad people?

Are we ready for an Internet where law enforcement keeps watch over every vituperative blog and backbiting comments section, ready to spring at the first hint of violence? Probably not. All vigorous debates shade into trolling at the perimeter; it is next to impossible to excise the trolling without snuffing out the debate.

That's Free Speech 101, but people seem to need to hear it again.

***

Schwartz assumes that trolls will successfully hide behind anonymity/pseudonymity, but we need to take note of the new developments in the AutoAdmit case:

With the help of a subpoena issued six months ago, attorneys for two Yale Law School students have succeeded in unmasking several anonymous users of the Web forum AutoAdmit whom the women are suing for defamation.

Some of the defendants will finally be named when the students soon file an amended complaint, said their attorney, Stanford Law Professor Mark Lemley, who declined to comment further....

John Williams, a court-appointed lawyer who represented AK-47, whom he has never met and whose identity he does not know, said he was disappointed by the judge's decision to sustain the subpoena, which he said went beyond where any other court has gone.

"Free speech takes another hit," he said....

Courts have long recognized that subpoenas may be available to identify anonymous commenters if litigants can demonstrate a plausible case for defamation and are not simply trying to intimidate critics, said Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles....

“If you’re doing right, the First Amendment will protect you,” [First Amendment lawyer Marc] Randazza said. “If you’re doing wrong, it won’t.”

Actually, the First Amendment won't protect you. A court is going to decide whether the plaintiff has met the legal standard Volokh is talking about, and a judge may not care enough about the right to say fuck you. You need more than the First Amendment for protection, you'll need judges who care about it and will stand tough and enforce hardcore free speech values even when confronted by seemingly nice, respectable plaintiffs who are royally outraged at insults and obscenities and delighted to use the courts to ruin brash young people who have said too much.

So what was that thing Ezra Klein feels so bad about?

Here he is feeling bad. Here's the thing.

By the way, remember the AutoAdmit lawsuit? If you think those Yale law students ought to be able to sue the on-line idiots for saying what they did about them, don't you also have to believe Tim Russert had a cause of action against Ezra Klein? 

ADDED: In the mindset of the AutoAdmit plaintiffs, what Ezra twittered was a rape threat.

The Sue Me, Sue You Blues.

George Harrison once sang: "You serve me and I'll serve you/Swing your partners, all get screwed/Bring your lawyer and I'll bring mine/Get together, and we could have a bad time."

If you sue me, I'm going to do my best to figure out how I can sue you. You want to think about that dynamic before you sue somebody.

So, anyway, Anthony Ciolli was sued by 2 Yale law students who were upset about comments on the AutoAdmit website that he used to work on, and now he's suing them and their lawyer — "seeking at least $50,000 in damages for abuse of process, libel and false light that he alleges cost him a job offer at a Boston law firm."

"This case is not about defending or exonerating anyone for the absolutely reprehensible comments that were made about the female law students on AutoAdmit," [Ciolli's lawyer Mark] Jakubik said. “It’s about what are the appropriate boundaries for seeking redress for those comments, and we think those boundaries were crossed to Anthony’s great detriment.”...

Federal law immunizes Web site administrators from liability for content posted by others...

The complaint alleges that the law students and their lawyers wrongfully initiated civil proceeding against Ciolli, that the students and a Web site they solicited to help restore their reputations libeled and slandered him and that the publicity they directed toward him placed him in a false light, with the result that he lost his job offer.

This new lawsuit has been filed in state court in Pennsylvania. (Quick, class, why does the court have personal jurisdiction over the Yale law students?) The complaint also uses the real names of the students, who used pseudonyms in the lawsuit against the pseudonymous AutoAdmit commenters.

"There was no real big secret about who they were," [Ciolli's former lawyer Marc] Randazza said.

Unlike the original suit, Ciolli’s complaint contains nothing that would be considered scandalous or would justify withholding the students’ names, Jakubik said.

"When folks engage in the kind of conduct that is outlined in the complaint, I’m not sure they should be given the cloak of anonymity," he said.

The decision to file a lawsuit is a momentous one. Think hard and think many steps ahead before you bring the courts into your life. Don't sue angry.

(Link via How Appealing.)

ADDED: Here's a PDF of the complaint.

"The comment is a general, aimless and inane suggestion posted on a message board known for its aimless inanity..."

"AK47" fights disclosure of his name in the suit by 2 Yale law students over nasty things said on the AutoAdmit website. (PDF of motion, discussed on the WSJ law blog.)

The "aimless and inane" thing AK47 wrote was: "Women named Jill and [Doe II’s equally common first name] should be raped."

"AutoAdmit is like the Iowa primary, where a really backwards group of people get way too much attention..."

The Harvard Record interviews the law school grad who hacked AutoAdmit. For the details of how he did it, go to the link. Here's what he found:

While the information is far from perfect, there were a significantly large number of lurkers when compared to very few posters, a trend that was very common. There were no more than 5 regular posters from [Harvard, as compared to over 150+ readers.

The vast majority of posters who claim to be at Harvard were not. Amazingly, there were entire threads where various HLS posters turned out to really be just one guy talking to himself (who was not even in law school yet!)....

Of my own classmates, and from what I understand from my peers at other schools who worked with me, the average AutoAdmit poster was largely restrained, apolitical, and was not particularly interesting....

Most of the time I looked at people and wasn't really that surprised that they wrote such offensive posts. I guess the real shocker was the number of women who post, which is surprisingly high....

Other than occasional one-time posters, AutoAdmit really is the playground of a handful of really obsessive people that is followed by an incredible number of watchers.

I guess those backward people are terrified that their names will become known. At least that will add some excitement to their restrained, apolitical, uninteresting lives.

"The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet."

Daniel J. Solove is offering free review copies of his book "The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet" to bloggers who act fast, write reasonably relevant blogs, and agree to review the book. (ILs: Is that an enforceable contract?)

I've already got the book, and I didn't agree in advance to write it up here. I note that he's cutting off the option of following the old advice of shutting up if you haven't got something nice to say. Which I sometimes follow.

You can also just buy the book: here.

I'll have more to say about it later. I note that it doesn't include the AutoAdmit scandal and that ham-handed lawsuit brought by some Yale Law Students.

The AutoAdmit lawsuit seems to be going nowhere.

Remember the AutoAdmit lawsuit? Click on the tag below to see some of my old posts. Yale law students sued in federal court about injury to their reputation because of... oh, I'm not going to explain it again. The point is that the case was filed 4 months ago and they still haven't served the defendants. Dave Hoffman has the story.

"Maybe she should sue AutoAdmit?"

Rueful punchline. If you don't get it, David Lat and I provide the background here.

ADDED: The comments at the first link are harrowing.

Writing under a pseudonym.

I've been thinking about pseudonymous writing lately.

There's the AutoAdmit case where two Yale law students are suing various pseudonymous individuals -- presumably law students -- who wrote outrageous things about them on an unmoderated website. The plaintiffs -- who are themselves using pseudonyms to hide their identity -- seek money damages from the pseudonymous writers, but they can also punish them -- even without prevailing on their claims -- simply by unmasking their true identity, which could make it difficult for them to pursue their legal careers.

Many bloggers use pseudonyms. There was that doctor who was defending himself in a malpractice suit and blogging about it on the side, calling himself "Flea." Are you Flea? Dr. Robert P. Lindeman was asked on cross-examination. He had to say yes, and, at that point, he had to settle the case. The jury would have hated him if they'd heard all the cocky things he thought the pseudonym freed him to write.

I've always blogged under my own name, though I sometimes ponder the question whether the "Ann Althouse" of the blog is the Ann Althouse of my real life. (We could digress into the subject of when life on the blog becomes one's real life and life in the physical world becomes the act. There is the mask one wears to live in Madison, Wisconsin and to function in the role of a law professor. The blog persona is different -- and I have even argued that my "front page" blog persona is different from my comments page persona! -- and it may be more genuine.)

I've written about my colleague who writes under a pseudonym:

Oscar wants to be free to use naughty words and otherwise break out of the professorial mode. But my experience is that even though students know who I am and can and do read this blog, they seem to accept this as a separate mode of mine and don't use it as a basis for talking to me in a newly confidential way. In the law school, the student-professor relationship is very well established. It really doesn't break down, even when students read your personal journal.

Or so I like to think! Maybe not. I'm sure some of my commenters -- writing under a pseudonym, of course -- will tell me that students do not keep this separate. How many of my pseudonymous commenters are, in fact, my students? Yesterday, I had a problem with a commenter who came here to speak insultingly to me -- "You look ugly, stop embarrassing us already!" -- and then asserted that he was a student at my law school. That crossed a line:

A law student might find it interesting to participate here and get outside of the conventional environment. But as soon as you identify yourself as a law student, that can't happen. And I'm not willing to assume my lawprof mentor style with someone who wants the freedom to talk to me in a way that he could not do if he were identified. I'm not going to have a conversation like that. If you want to talk to me as a law student or alumnus, do that, and act like one. But don't come here and insult me and leave me feeling like I have to respond in a tolerant, supportive way.

Remember the old problem of authors adopting a pseudonym so they could lard their book's Amazon page with fulsome praise? And, of course, there's the journalist or blogger who adopts a pseudonym to participate in his comments section as if he were a fan of himself.

I used to think it would be an artistic thing to do to be various personas writing within one's own comments section or writing and linking on various other blogs. The model I had in mind was Plato's dialogues. Why not design a set of fictional characters and write in dialogue form? Though I've written about doing that before, I've never done it. Years ago, it seemed purely creative to me. Today, it's so obviously against the culture that has grown up within blogging that it would require a very different sort of decision to go that route. One could do something like that by clearly revealing that the pseudonyms are your fictional characters. That would be like a novelist writing in the first person. No one thinks that is a fraud.

By contrast, there are these writers who purport to be memoirists who make things up. But they don't have a problem with pseudonymity. They have a problem blurring the line between truth and fiction. A fascinating pseudonym problem occurs when a writer uses a false identity to make a work of fiction more interesting and saleable.

There was a trial this week in a civil suit for fraud against Laura Albert, who made up the name "JT LeRoy" to write a novel -- "Sarah" -- about West Virginia lowlifes:

Ms. Albert, 41, was found by the jury in Federal District Court to have strayed beyond the normal limits of pseudonymous invention, in part by signing a movie contract using her nom de plume...

Long before this somewhat narrow legal matter reached the courts, the broader story of JT LeRoy, with its agitprop allure and celebrity aroma, played out on the larger and much more garish canvas of the press. After “Sarah” thrust the writer into stardom in 2000, JT LeRoy became the damaged darling of the art house set, a street waif and supposed son of a truck stop prostitute who, usually by way of telephone or e-mail (he was “famously reclusive”), befriended the likes of Courtney Love and Winona Ryder — at least until his startling existence as a fiction was revealed.

All the while, of course, it was Ms. Albert, a mother and otherwise obscure novelist from Brooklyn Heights, who was spinning gritty fantasies of drug addiction and Appalachian misery for the rich and famous names at the other end of the keyboard or the line. She gave interviews in a twangy accent to Terry Gross on NPR and sometimes paid her former boyfriend’s half-sister to appear in disguise as JT LeRoy in the rarefied air of literary readings or the international film festival at Cannes.

It was deceptions like these that Antidote’s lawyers said constituted her fraud. Yet even though the company’s lawyers assailed her in court as a trickster and wily master of self-promotion, they — and their client, Mr. Levy-Hinte — admitted a grudging admiration for her writing talents, and for her performance.

They also evinced a quiet sympathy for Ms. Albert, for it was soon apparent that the eight-day trial would include testimony about her rather gruesome history — a litany of adolescent trauma that included sexual abuse, institutionalization and 13 years of telephone therapy in which she spoke to her psychiatrist in the adopted persona of a teenage boy. That boy, whom she took to calling Jeremy or Jeremiah, was a sort of early incarnation of the full-blown alter ego that would eventually evolve into JT LeRoy.

Hmmm... the whole trial worked as a publicity stunt. It subtly transformed Albert into a sympathetic victim.

Among the various battles waged at the trial — art versus commerce, truth versus fiction, reality versus the imagination — it was perhaps the battle over JT LeRoy’s purpose in the world that was most in dispute. Before his identity (or, rather, nonidentity) was revealed last year in a series of newspaper articles, the production team at Antidote considered him that rare commodity in today’s biography-obsessed entertainment world: a gifted writer with a titillating past that only enhanced the value of the work. After the revelation, the company took the position that Ms. Albert had used the JT LeRoy “brand” — the same that had attracted them — as a celebrity magnet to draw attention to her books.

Ms. Albert herself, in testimony from the stand, suggested that JT LeRoy was far more than a pseudonym in the classic Mark Twain-Samuel Clemens mold. She offered the idea that JT LeRoy was a sort of “respirator” for her inner life: an imaginary, though necessary, survival apparatus that permitted her to breathe.

So she has to pay back the option money, but the trial works to nullify the problem of the fake identity and to allow Albert to step into the spotlight as a writer who can openly take credit for her book. Presumably, it's a good book. Now, by the ordeal of trial, she has become a saleable character. She can now seek absolution in the Church of Oprah. Tell us all about how you needed JT LeRoy as respirator.

I half-suspect the lawsuit was a collusive enterprise, designed to advance the movie project and accomplish the disclosure of the author's identity with panache. You start off as an author with a boring background, so you make up a fictional identity, and then the process of owning up to your deception makes you interesting in your own right. If you'd just issued a press release, we'd have had contempt for you. But this ordeal of trial makes us care.

Where is the real fraud?

Another lawsuit threatens free speech on the internet.

We've been talking about the lawsuit brought by two Yale law students who are suing various individuals over some nasty talk about them at the AutoAdmit. NPR will have an "All Things Considered" story on the subject today. I gave a 20 minute interview to the reporter and will be interested to see which part of it they use. Perhaps none. I'm going to guess that the story will be very supportive of the students and will underplay free speech concerns.

Now, we have a fine opportunity to see how people think about free speech on the internet when the politics are turned around. Seeing the Forest for the Trees tells us:

Lee Kaplan writes at David Horowitz's far-right, anti-Muslim FrontPageMag.com. A college student set up the blog Lee Kaplan Watch to expose what the guy is writing. He was sued by Kaplan in small claims court for "business interference," and Kaplan won $7500.

The Yale law students are thinking big, going to federal court (relying on a very minor copyright claim to leverage a complicated collection of state law claims) and seeking over $200,000. Kaplan took the opposite approach: He sued in small claims court. He won $7500, because he only sued for $7500 -- the most you can ask for in small claims court in California.

The blogger -- Yaman Salahi -- writes:

My speech has been punished by a ruling with no opinion explaining why or advising me what not to do in the future. My credibility has been tarnished by a trial with incredibly low standards for admissible evidence and a messy, inconsistent court procedure. And, for me, worst of all: I will never know what element of Kaplan's claim, if any, the judge agreed with, though Kaplan will certainly continue to claim that all of them were accepted, though he knows well that this is not the case.

So, thinking small looks like an effective way to squelch speech. Many people who write on the internet don't have much money, and $7500 (plus legal fees) is a lot to pay for writing something. Worse, if the court's opinion doesn't explain what you did wrong, how can you keep writing? You have to worry about the next small claims lawsuit.

Note: I have not looked into the underlying facts of this case or the practices and procedures of the court. It's quite possible that the blogger really did libel Lee Kaplan or commit some other tort and that the court proceeded fairly. I simply want to call this case to your attention to consider alongside the AutoAdmit case.

Seeing the Forest concludes:

This is a freedom of speech and right-to-blog issue. We must do something to reverse this because it will become a convenient way for right-wingers to harass all of us.

Oh, how short-sighted we are! Are you going to become a free-speech champion when the plaintiff is a right-winger and a big fan of tort law when the plaintiffs' claims resonate with feminist ideology? That's not the way law works.

UPDATE: You can listen to the NPR story on AutoAdmit here. None of my quotes were used. Here's the AutoAdmit discussion thread which has the guys listening to the story in real time, expressing their annoyance at the intervening news stories -- "Stupid Daniel Schorr talking about stupid George Bush!/How in f*ck did he ever get on the radio? He sounds like he had a stroke" --- and opining "Althouse got slighted." After the show: "Hands down fairest coverage this board has ever received. i love npr." "I like how they suggested GTO getting offerpwn3d would be some consolation to the Ps." GTO is Anthony Ciolli (the site's "educational director") had a job offer rescinded after the controversy hit the media.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Salahi has a thoughtful essay on his predicament here.

As long as I'm going over a few things people have been saying about me...

Let me note that Patterico didn't like what I said about the AutoAdmit case, but then he worried that he was too harsh, so he wrote a post saying he liked what I said in that post about Glenn Greenwald... except the part that he didn't like (where I -- horrors! -- showed a little appreciation for Chris Matthews).

On the AutoAdmit case, he says:

[I]t is indeed quite a spectacle to watch law professors with established reputations and prominent spots on the Internet — both of which they can use to counter any unjust criticism of themselves — labeling as oversensitive fledgling lawyers with no established reputation and no platform for responding to scurrilous allegations.

I agree that law students are in a very different position, and I understand the great anxiety these things cause. I am continually aware of the benefits I enjoy because I have tenure and a high-traffic blog. These two things do also attract special attacks and make people feel especially free to say whatever they like about me. But I am not losing sight of the fact that the law students are in another position. I have a lot of empathy for law students -- much more than for law professors! I've devoted decades to working with law students, and to say I don't care about what happens to them is to attack my "established reputation." That matters to me. But, of course, obviously, I'm in a different position and I always keep that in mind when the subject is law students.

You may not notice it, but I almost never write anything about law students. Unless there is actually a newspaper article raising an important controversy involving them, I am extremely unlikely ever to say anything negative about them. Often law student blogs say very nasty things about me, and I say nothing. I don't fight back, because they are law students. It just doesn't seem right. With respect to this AutoAdmit controversy, I'm trying to keep my distance from it -- believe it or not -- because I don't want to say anything negative about law students.

I concede that I said something dismissive in response to the original Washington Post story, to the extent that it characterized a student as claiming that she lost out on job offers because chatboard guys talked too much about how pretty she was. I don't think being beautiful and causing sexual desire in others is that harmful to your reputation. That said, I do acknowledge the anxiety caused by the over-the-top, outrageous writing when it crosses the line and makes it seem as though someone will show up in real life as a stalker or a rapist.

I am trying not to write too much on the subject, but at the same time it's frustrating to see a complex set of events and individuals jumbled together and discussed in a highly emotional and extremely ideological way -- not only in blogs and news articles, but in the complaint itself. Patterico criticizes me for not putting more effort into untangling the jumbled complaint. This conflicts with my preference for staying out of it for the most part, mainly because I don't want to criticize law students and or to give raw material to the ideological extremists who are eager to use anything I say that doesn't toe the line to trash my reputation as a law professor.

So I'm really conflicted about this. I can see that ideologues are not only viciously attacking me but also trying to frame the debate in a very skewed way that puts a low value on free speech and a high value on using lawsuits to enforce politeness of the internet. It's mostly done by stressing the great danger of violence against women and trashing anyone who doesn't see that (admittedly worthy) concern as trumping anything else. So since I do have tenure and a high-traffic blog, I feel I need to stay in it and counter some of that. Believe me, it's no fun.

Should you sue people who say terrible things about you?

Eugene Volokh has more on the AutoAdmit case, noting the risks plaintiffs take when they sue. First, the lawsuit calls more attention to the scurrilous comments. Eugene notes, though, it's unlikely anyone hearing the AutoAdmit idiocy is going to believe it. (If so, shouldn't you lose on the merits?) Second, the plaintiffs are themselves coming forward with information that hurts their own reputation, notably the failure of Doe I to receive any summer job offers. Like me, Eugene doesn't believe in the causal connection between the AutoAdmit crap and the lack of success in the job market. Being skeptical of the causal connection, he does what an ordinary, analytical person would do and speculates:

[I]t seems to me that the likely reasons for Doe I's striking out were among the normal reasons why many people who look great on paper don't do as well in the hiring market as they'd like -- they don't seem that interested in firm jobs, their credentials aren't really that good, they come across as too quiet or nervous, they come across as too brash and self-important, they flub some questions, they rub the interviewers the wrong way, some of their professors are unimpressed by them and say so, and so on.

By making the causal connection an issue in the case, Doe I forces the defendants to try to prove that there are other causes. They'll want to get discovery from the law firms that interviewed her and find out what the reasons were. This could be quite bad. (I once testified in a federal case in which the law school was sued for reverse discrimination in hiring. I'd been a chair of the Appointments Committee, and I had to explain at length why the plaintiff's credentials were far below what we look for in faculty hiring.)

Even if the firms actually did take into account ridiculous material they found on line, they are going to minimize their own bad behavior, and:

What's more, the law firms aren't being painted as the bad guys in this law suit, so it's not a case where (for instance) someone sues an employer for discrimination and the employer's badmouthing of the plaintiff could be put off to the employer's racism or sexism or what have you. It's just sixteen law firms that come across as largely disinterested bystanders (despite the possible reason to shade the truth that I mention above, a reason that is likely not to be prominent in observers' mind) and that talk about how Doe I botched her interview, or about how her grades were really pretty weak. That's not exactly the best publicity for an aspiring young lawyer, especially given that the case about online chatter is likely to lead to online chatter.

And he's not even mentioning the negative effect of revealing your propensity to litigate.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds calls attention to Patterico's post -- which is also critical of me -- and says:

Patterico... thinks I'm wrong to be dismissive of the plaintiff's claims. Well, I'm pretty thick-skinned about Internet trash-talk -- when I teach libel I give my students a few choice search terms and let them see what people have said about me. They're usually appalled, but I've never sued anyone, and the list of things about which I might actually sue is awfully short. Besides, once you get past the puppy-blending stuff, who's going to believe much of anything they read?

And I could put together tons of terrible things people have said about me -- people who are actively trying to destroy my reputation, who publish many lies about me, and who allow their commenters to post using my name (even after I have repeatedly requested the deletion of those comments).

But I've never seriously considered suing anyone over it.... and not just because I'm hoping -- like Glenn -- that people won't believe it. It offends my principles and my sense of decency to intimidate people who are exercising free speech. These lawsuits have an ugly chilling effect, and I wouldn't want to be part of it.

I'm not saying there's nothing that would push me over the line, though, so don't take this as an encouragement to push the anti-Althousiana envelope.... not that I think those who toil in the genre have the creativity to push the envelope beyond the usual dumb stuff about my being an evil insane idiot who doesn't deserve to be a law professor.

Yale law students sue over "the scummiest kind of sexually offensive tripe" at AutoAdmit.

WSJ Law Blog has the story:

In the latest chapter of the AutoAdmit.com scandal, two female Yale Law School students have sued Anthony Ciolli, the Web site’s former “chief educational director,” and more than two dozen others who allegedly used pseudonyms and posted the students’ photos as well as defamatory and threatening remarks about them on the online law-school discussion forum....

The law students aren’t named in the suit — filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Connecticut — which claims the defendants violated copyright infringement by posting photos of one of the women without her permission, falsely posing as the women in posts on the site, and engaging in “unreasonable publicity given to another’s life; publicity that places another in a false light before the public; intentional infliction of emotional distress; negligent infliction of emotional distress; and defamation.”

The complaint asks for judgment against the defendants for unspecified damages as well as punitive damages in the amount of $245,400. Besides Ciolli, named defendants include individuals with pseudonyms such as “Pauliewalnuts” and “The Ayatollah of Rock-n-Rollah.”

“It’s bringing the right to protect yourself against offensive words and images into the 21st century,” said David N. Rosen, a New Haven, Conn.-based attorney for the students and a senior research scholar in law at Yale Law to the Law Blog in an interview. “This is the scummiest kind of sexually offensive tripe,” he said of the postings about the women on AutoAdmit.

So this is the 21st century? Where courts award punitive damages for offensive words and pictures? Isn't "the scummiest kind of sexually offensive tripe" exactly what we always used to say people had to put up with in a free country? Man, that was so 20th century!

ADDED: Over at AutoAdmit, they're trashing the complaint.

MORE: Glenn Reynolds: "Stuff that offends dumb hicks in the heartland is constitutionally protected. Stuff that offends Yale Law Students must be stamped out!" Yeah, really.

And in the comments Bruce Hayden raises a damned good question about the copyright claim (which is the whole basis for federal subject matter jurisdiction in the complaint (PDF)): "Copyright protects original expression. Thus, the photographer would be the copyright owner, not the subject of the photographs." I'm not a copyright expert, and I'm not writing this as anyone's lawyer -- I'm retired from the practice of law -- but it looks to me as though the copyright claim is completely frivolous, and all the other claims are state law claims. Subject matter jurisdiction is based only on federal question jurisdiction, not diversity of citizenship, so all those state law claims are in federal court because they are supplemental to the federal claim. Under § 1367(c), then, when the copyright claim is tossed out, the whole case should be dismissed. Unless our fearless lawyer refiles in state court, we'll never get to hash out all the interesting free speech issues. But then, this case should never have been filed. So, much as I'd like to see a strong precedent protecting offensive speech, it will be good to see this nipped in the bud.

AND: The complaint does assert that one of the plaintiffs owns the copyright in the photographs that are the basis of the copyright claims. It appears that the plaintiff acquired the copyrights in preparation for the lawsuit, and I'll leave it to copyright experts to say more about that, but the question I want to raise is: If the plaintiff(s) did not own the copyrights at the same time as the other incidents alleged in the complaint, how can the copyright infringement be part of the same constitutional case as all the state law tort claims under §1367(a)? That is, how can the federal court have jurisdiction over anything but the copyright claims?

ONE MORE THING: This post originated as a response to the lawyer's phrase "the scummiest kind of sexually offensive tripe." I want to see "the scummiest kind of sexually offensive tripe" protected. That doesn't mean I support defamation or the revelation of private facts or impersonating someone by name on a website. Those are different matters, and I don't mean to express an opinion as to whether any torts like that are alleged in the complaint. I just want to remind people to keep our free speech bearings. We have lost our way if we've forgotten the importance of protecting speech that is "scummy" and "offensive" and "tripe."

ADDED: Eugene Volokh has a detailed post on many of the fine points of liability.

What exactly are the law firm's values?

Remember the AutoAdmit controversy? Today, the WSJ Law Blog reports:

The Law Blog has learned that law firm Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge rescinded its job offer to Anthony Ciolli, the 3L at Penn Law who resigned as “Chief Education Director” of AutoAdmit last month. He resigned in the wake of a WaPo exposé on how the site in part served as a platform for attacks and defamatory remarks about female law students, among others (see our earlier post here)....

On April 11, just over a month after the WaPo story ran, DeWitt sent a letter to Ciolli stating that the firm had recently learned of the controversy involving AutoAdmit, in particular its “off-topic” message board, and that “the information we now have raises serious concerns about your joining our firm.”

[Boston managing partner Charles] DeWitt wrote that the content of the messages on the board are “antithetical” to the values of the firm and the “principles of collegiality and respect that members of the legal profession should observe in their dealings with other lawyers.” DeWitt pointed out that in an online letter to another blogger, Ciolli and his partner Jarret Cohen identified themselves as AutoAdmit’s administrators and defended its “free, uninhibited exchange of ideas.”

DeWitt continued: “We expect any lawyer affiliated with our firm, when presented with the kind of language exhibited on the message board, to reject it and to disavow any affiliation with it. You, instead, facilitated the expression and publication of such language. . . . ” He wrote, his resignation from the site was “too late to ameliorate our concerns.”...

Cohen, a 23-year-old insurance broker in Allentown, Pa., who says he founded AutoAdmit and currently runs the site, told the Law Blog: “It was me. I created the message board. I exercised ultimate authority. Anthony didn’t endorse any of this stuff. He doesn’t deserve this. This is guilt by association.”

So what are the law firm's values? Not free speech. Not fairness. "Respect" for "other lawyers" -- I'll give them that. The central value is probably just a deep-seated fear of any association with controversy.

(For more discussion on other blogs, start here.)

IN THE COMMENTS: Revenant says:

The Three Laws of Lawbotics:

(1): You must cover your own ass.

(2): You must cover the asses of the partners at your law firm, unless doing so would violate the first law.

(3): You must cover the collective ass of the legal profession, unless doing so would violate the first or second laws.

"There is something a little strange about YLJ changing the text of an article..."

"... (even if it is just an aspect of the byline) after it has been published, and to do so without advance notice and discussion with the author." More overreacting to the AutoAdmit thing.

UPDATE: The linked post is now updated to say that the author was given advance notice:

Through some careful wording in his post on First Movers, [Anthony] Ciolli left me with the impression that he was sandbagged by this development when in fact he chose not to respond to an email to him that informed him of what YLJ stated its plans were. That said, having seen the letter YLJ wrote to Ciolli, it is clear that YLJ's plans to change the essay were not an invitation to discussion or negotiation, since the letter opens with "We are appalled by the postings on AutoAdmit.com that threaten and defame our classmates, and we have decided to disable our website’s link to www.autoadmit.com. This letter describes the effects of that decision and our reasons for it."

Here's what I take to be the upshot of the saga: YLJ gave advance notice to Ciolli and had Ciolli wanted to find a solution better than what was proposed, he could have tried to have done so but he didn't even bother to respond.