Yale Students' Lawsuit Unmasks Anonymous Trolls, Opens Pandora's Box

[flashl]

Wired
By Ryan Singel
07.30.08

"Women named Jill and Hillary should be raped."

Those are the words of "AK-47" -- a poster to the college-admissions web forum AutoAdmit.com. AK-47 was one of a handful of students heaping misogynist scorn on women attending the nations' top law schools in 2007, in posts so vile they spurred a national debate on the limits of online anonymity, and an unprecedented federal lawsuit aimed at unmasking and punishing the posters.

Now lawyers for two female Yale Law School students have ascertained AK-47's real identity, along with the identities of other AutoAdmit posters, who all now face the likely publication of their names in court records -- potentially marking a death sentence for the comment trolls' budding legal careers even before the case has gone to trial.

The unmasking of the posters marks a milestone in a rare legal challenge to the norms of online commenting, where arguments live on for years in search-engine results and where reputations can be sullied nearly irreparably by anyone with a grudge, a laptop and a WiFi connection. Yet a year after the lawsuit was filed, little else has been resolved -- and legal controversies have multiplied. The women themselves have gone silent, and their lawyers -- two of whom are now themselves being sued -- are not talking to the press. Legal experts are beginning to wonder aloud if there's any point in pressing the messy lawsuit.

"You have good lawyers putting their time in on the case, and in a policy sense, they are achieving something, says Ann Bartow, an associate professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law. "But in a victim sense -- assuming you think of the women as victims -- it's not clear what this is going to achieve."

[ThomCat]

1. Words like that SHOULD destroy their legal careers.

Clearly they have no regard for the law in regard to the people they are threatening.

Let their own bigotry banish them to low paid jobs with no hope of advancement. It's a bit of justice. I hope they have to watch the women they threatened advance far above them.
x(

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. Any law student who doesn't undertand that there is no such thing

as on-line anonymity has no business being a law student in the first place.

More power to the women that stopped these schmucks before they became lawyers and started doing real damage (which is not to say that the damage they did to these women is not real).