Women Law Students at Yale Law Name Male Student(s) Who Libeled Them On the Web

From the Boston Globe (boston.com), a news story reports that two women students defamed on the website AutoAdmit, have been able to pierce the veils of anonymity of their harassers. As far as I can tell, all those who posted the most crude, obscene, and of course false statements about the women students, are male students -- most of them law students.

According to the Globe article: "The case is not unprecedented, but it is a reminder that anonymous postings on the freewheeling Internet can be traced, legal analysts say."

The article goes on the say: "The women say Ryan made sexually charged slurs about them on the Web, including a false claim that one of the them had a sexually transmitted disease. The lawsuit also says Ryan encouraged further attacks on the other woman and used anti-Semitic language."

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/08/07/yale_students_name_alleged_harasser_in_web_libel_suit/

During the last few months I've read a couple reports as well as a book that discusses problems with developing appropriate sense of ethics in law students. This case is very revealing on that point. The alleged defamatory statements were made to AutoAdmit, "an Internet discussion board about colleges and law schools that draws 800,000 to 1 million visitors per month."

I won't go into the lurid details of what the posters said - you can read it in the Globe article if interested. I just think the situation might serve as an interesting case study for use in the writing classroom as far as "anonymity" on the web. And, this story also points to the fantastical view that women have achieved "equality" in the legal sphere. The studies that wonder why women lawyers often drop out of practice after having spent so much time achieving their degrees might find a partial answer in this story. I don't know. There's certainly a potential dissertation that could be developed from just this incident alone!