Law Students Suing Law Students Ends In Settlement

from the precedent-missing dept

We've covered the lawsuit over comments on the site AutoAdmit for the past couple years. The quick summary is that AutoAdmit is an online forum for law school students where, like many online forums, sometimes the conversations get pretty mean. Two female Yale law students sued the site and a bunch of anonymous commenters, after they posted some mean things about them. There's no denying that the comments were pretty obnoxious, though it's not clear that, given the context, anyone took them seriously. The women claimed that they had trouble getting jobs because of the comments, but there was little evidence to support that either. Still, you had a bunch of law students angry with each other, so of course lawsuits were filed -- some very badly (such as against one of the guys who helped run the site and was clearly protected from liability).

Some were hoping that this lawsuit would create new rules concerning online defamation or other "mean" content online. For example, there's been a push for a DMCA-style "takedown" system that would require sites to take down such content. However, in this case, it looks like no precedent will be set at all, as the parties have all settled and the terms of the settlement are confidential (found via Thomas O'Toole).

The issue is a tough one, certainly. It's no fun to be on the receiving end of such speech -- but should it be illegal or should there be an automatic takedown system on such content? That seems extreme and questionable when it comes to the First Amendment issue. In the end, I think the context of the content remains important -- and content in such a forum, where it was pretty obviously ridiculous, is the sort of thing that's better left ignored, rather than filing a lawsuit over it.

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AutoAdmit Commenter Asks To Be Dropped From Lawsuit

from the let-me-go... dept

We've covered the bizarre AutoAdmit lawsuit for a while now, but the story just keeps getting more ridiculous. If you don't recall, AutoAdmit was a forum site used by law students to discuss all sorts of things -- some of which were crude and potentially offensive. Two women law students who got upset about how they were portrayed on the site ended up filing a bunch of lawsuits over the site, and some of those who were included in the lawsuit sued back (what do you expect with a bunch of law students?). Honestly, it sounds like the whole thing was blown completely out of proportion. Yes, anonymous idiots on message boards say all sorts of stupid stuff, but it's difficult to see how any of it rose to the level of being legally actionable. In fact, calling attention to it seems much more likely to damage the reputations of the women suing than fleeting immature sophomoric comments from a bunch of idiots. Almost anyone reading those original threads would be hard pressed to take any of the comments seriously. But seeing someone overreact and sue over those comments is something worth noting as a character reference.

Already, one of the defendants sued by the women had the case dropped, and now another one is asking a judge to drop him from the case as well. He admits that he made two crude comments on the site (anonymously, at the time), suggesting that he would like to have sex with one of the women, but that's not against the law. He's also complaining that the womens' lawyers don't seem to want to actually serve the lawsuit on him or explain what's actionable about his comments, noting:

Mariner has been trying to proceed with this litigation for months. However in an attempt to execute a strategy so Byzantine that Kafka himself would be dumbfounded, Plaintiffs' counsel has failed to include any allegations that would support a cause of action, refused Mariner's counsel's offer to accept service and refused to simply dismiss Mariner. It appears Plaintiff's plan is to keep a lawsuit pending for as long as possible without actually prosecuting it.

While I keep hearing lawyers claim that this AutoAdmit case will be important in establishing "boundaries" for what is and what is not acceptable online forum banter, so far, the case can only be described as a huge mess of angry lawyers suing each other.

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AutoAdmit Lawsuit Leads To Suggestion For Dreadful DMCA-Style Takedowns Of Defamation

from the not-a-good-situation dept

For a while now, we've been covering the lawsuits surrounding "AutoAdmit." If you haven't been paying attention, AutoAdmit is a message board system used by law school students, many of whom apparently used it to be what, at best, might be called juvenile jerks. For example, there were certain threads insulting various female law students (in incredibly crude terms), which those students insisted cost them jobs. This point is rather difficult to prove -- because there are many reasons why the women might not have been able to get jobs, and any firm that won't hire someone because of juvenile messages on a message board probably isn't worth working for (also, a few months back, someone sent us some evidence that one of the women actually had gotten a job at a law firm, despite her complaints of not being able to).

However, since we're dealing with a bunch of law students and lawyers, it wasn't long before the lawsuits began flying. First, the women filed lawsuits against the message board, various anonymous posters and an administrator of the message board. Of course, the administrator pointed out (correctly) that he's clearly protected, and eventually he was dropped from the lawsuit -- but not before he lost his job. So, of course, he sued back for the wrongfully targeted lawsuit against him. Quite a mess.

Wired News is running an update on the case, where it reveals that one of the anonymous law students who made the juvenile comments has now been identified to the women filing the lawsuit, meaning that he won't be anonymous much longer. This is a bit surprising, since we've seen a series of lawsuits lately that US courts believe it's important to protect anonymity, even in cases where the content in question is "unquestionably offensive and demeaning."

However, what's more interesting, is the rest of the article from Wired, where it explores the "Pandora's Box" this case has opened up concerning a bunch of issues involving free speech, anonymity and the limits of both. And, of course, since we have a bunch of lawyers involved, there's one downright scary suggestion: create a DMCA-like law that allows someone to demand a takedown of content they find defamatory. If you thought false DMCA takedowns were a bit much, can you imagine how many such defamation takedown's would be sent on a regular basis? As we've seen time and time again, many people (falsely) assume that any content they don't like is defamatory, and already send cease-and-desist letters at the drop of a hat. If you added a notice-and-takedown provision, this would be abused to no end.

But, in the end, as the article notes, it's unclear what good any of this has done. The lawsuit is wasting a lot of people's times, and is doing a lot more to harm various reputations than the original thread ever really did. Yes, it was offensive, demeaning, juvenile and idiotic to some extent. But, opting to file a lawsuit almost seems guaranteed to make the situation a lot worse -- and, frankly, seems to do a lot more damage to the law students suing, than any random obviously childish thread on an open message board would ever do.

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When Law Students Get Angry... Lawsuits Get Filed

from the and-so-it-goes dept

A year ago, we wrote about a popular law student message board/forum called AutoAdmit that was making some female law students upset, as they claimed sexist messages on those boards were making it difficult for them to find a job. The reasoning didn't make that much sense. The messages, while certainly crude, seemed unlikely to be the sort that would keep an employer from hiring. They basically just made comments about the women's appearances. There was no evidence at all that the postings kept the women from getting jobs. Not surprisingly, though, considering that we're talking about law students, it didn't take long for lawsuits to be filed, including one against a Penn State law student named Anthony Ciolli, who was an editor of AutoAdmit, but had no direct involvement with the content that upset the women. In November, Ciolli was dropped from the lawsuit, but not before all of the attention had cost him his job at a high-paying law firm.

Once again, given that we're talking about a bunch of lawyers, it will probably surprise no one to discover that Ciolli has now filed a lawsuit against the two women who had sued him originally, charging them with libel for falsely dragging his name into the mess. The whole thing seems like a giant disaster that's only likely to get worse before it works itself out. So far, the lesson seems to be that some lawyers are pretty thin-skinned and likely to file lawsuits over just about anything. But, perhaps we already knew that. Perhaps we should be happy that they're just filing lawsuits against each other, rather than bothering everyone else with unnecessary lawsuits.

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