Archive for June, 2007

Making Sense Out of the Iraqi Detention Cases

posted by Steve Vladeck

As Lyle noted on Tuesday over at SCOTUSblog, the first Iraqi detention case has made its way to the Supreme Court, with the filing of the cert. petition in Munaf v. Geren. Given that the hypertechnical issues raised in the cases might make it somewhat difficult to appreciate the full scope of what is at stake, I thought I’d add my own two cents on why Munaf is such an important case, both with respect to clarifying the D.C. Circuit’s messy case law, and with respect to (finally) dealing with the Supreme Court’s 1948 decision in Hirota v. MacArthur, either by limiting it to its narrower holding, or by doing away with it altogether.

More below the fold…

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  June 21, 2007 at 5:34 am   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments

A Tour of the Solar Flares

posted by Mike O'Shea

It’s 2507. You’re sailing in a tour ship thousands of miles above the surface of the Sun. From the air-conditioned quiet of its observation deck, you look down through huge, shielded windows into the sea of fire, watching enormous prominences sprout into the blackness like trees of flame.

That, anyway, is the picture I always see when I listen to “To Here Knows When,” the fourth track on My Bloody Valentine‘s Loveless (1991). The keyboards and drums percolate and chatter high, distant, gliding by calmly as the solar feedback roils and combusts in the foreground, vast and wild.

Loveless is the contemporary sublime. It taught the ’90s how to sound. I’m not much given to psychedelic experiences, but this LP, played loud in a darkening room, is one. Or you can put it on in the background in your office on a Wednesday evening, as you work on an article. That works too.

  June 20, 2007 at 7:17 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   7 Comments

Is This The Beginning of the End for U.S. News Undergrad Rankings, and Will Law School Rankings Survive the Collapse?

posted by Melissa Waters

The New York Times reports today that the presidents of dozens of liberal arts colleges have agreed to stop participating in U.S. News’ college rankings survey. According to the report, the Annapolis Group, an association of liberal arts colleges, released a statement that a majority of the 80 college presidents attending its annual meeting had declared their intent not to participate in the U.S. News rankings. The move follows on the heels of similar efforts by college presidents earlier this year, and of a widely-publicized critique of the rankings system last month in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Has the liberal arts world finally decided that enough is enough? The Times quotes Judith Shapiro, president of Barnard College: “Frankly, it had bubbled up to the point of, why should we do this work for them? … [T]his is not our project.” Of course, the jury is still out on whether the liberal arts colleges’ nascent rebellion will have legs. Not surprisingly, some schools at the top of the food chain – e.g., #2 Amherst – plan to continue to cooperate with U.S. News, and want further “discussion” of the issue. Still, this latest move by liberal arts colleges seems to be more than mere window dressing.

All of this has me wondering: If U.S. News loses its undergrad rankings cash cow, will the law school rankings be far behind? Or might the law school rankings survive, even if the undergrad rankings collapse? Put differently, are there reasons why the law school world will (and perhaps should) continue to “do U.S. News’ work for them”?

I can think of a couple of reasons why law school rankings might survive, despite the collapse of undergrad rankings.

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  June 20, 2007 at 4:07 pm   Posted in: Law School (Rankings)   Print This Post   11 Comments

The Department of Ill-Advised Job Titles

posted by Dan Filler

UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law has just announced the creation of a Lethal Injection Fellowship. I applaud the institutional commitment to this work – the fellow will create and manage a clearinghouse of information regarding lethal injection challenges – but the title is a bit ghoulish.

Or perhaps the discomforting title was strategic. It will certainly create some unusual interview chat as fellows go off to find their first post-fellowship position.

UPDATE: A spelling error has been corrected.

  June 20, 2007 at 2:51 pm   Posted in: Capital Punishment   Print This Post   3 Comments

Publicize or Perish

posted by Frank Pasquale

Any academics interested in getting their research disseminated should read Michael Jensen’s incisive essay The New Metrics of Scholarly Authority. Jensen offers the following “preconditions for scholarly success in Authority 3.0:”

They include the digital availability of a text for indexing . . . the digital availability of the full text for referencing, quoting, linking, tagging; and the existence of metadata of some kind that identifies the document, categorizes it, contextualizes it, summarizes it, and perhaps provides key phrases from it, while also allowing others to enrich it with their own comments, tags, and contextualizing elements.

Looks like it’s time to update Balkin & Levinson’s classic “How to Win Cites and Influence People.”

Apropos of my last post, I find it interesting how this academic “push to publicize” mirrors the accelerating trend in social networking toward making the details of one’s life accessible. Emily Nussbaum at New York Magazine says “the future belongs to the uninhibited.” Lakshmi Chaudry reports than an unreasonable expectation of publicity may have displaced our reasonable expectation of privacy:

Not only do Americans increasingly want to be famous, but they also believe they will be famous, more so than any previous generation. A Harris poll conducted in 2000 found that 44 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 24 believed it was at least somewhat likely that they would be famous for a short period. . . . . The rosy predictions of our destiny, however, contain within them the darker conviction that a life led outside the spotlight would be without value. “People want the kind of attention that celebrities receive more than anything else,” says Niedzviecki [in his book Hello, I'm Special.].

Chaudry anticipates a time when everyone feels they need to have a self-publicizing apparatus, be it a MySpace page, website, or blog. Fame is a positional good, and an inevitably competitive dynamic ensues (though, as Tyler Cowen & Will Wilkinson note, the internet has also made it possible to find fame in smaller niches).

I think this competitive dynamic goes a long way toward explaining the huge generation gap between old and young on privacy concerns. As Sherry Turkle notes in this podcast, what was once experienced as violation is now often seen as validation. The social networking sites do not merely mirror extant “real world” friendships and relationships; they effectively write them into being.

  June 20, 2007 at 2:05 pm   Posted in: Google & Search Engines   Print This Post   No Comments

Religion and Bankruptcy

posted by Nate Oman

What impact does religion have on personal bankruptcy filings? That is the question asked by Zeke Johnson and James Wright in a recent Suffolk University Law Review article.*

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  June 20, 2007 at 10:46 am   Posted in: Bankruptcy, Religion   Print This Post   4 Comments

Hillary Taps Into Soprano America

posted by Dan Filler

Hillary Clinton’s featured in a new video playing off the Sopranos closer. It’s fun to see Bill and Hil acting, and there’s a nice guest appearance to boot. Remember Bill playing his sax on Arsenio Hall? These guys understand that you need to position yourself in the true American heartland – TV – if you want to connect with voters.

Watch it here. (You’ll have to pass through a fund-raising machine to get there.)

  June 19, 2007 at 2:24 pm   Posted in: Advertising, Culture, Politics   Print This Post   2 Comments

Google Street View: All the World’s a Stage

posted by Frank Pasquale

Yesterday I joined the NPR “Talk of the Nation” program to discuss Google’s privacy policies. The callers were most fascinated by Google’s new “Street View” feature, which lets users “view street level shots of each block.” One said this was obviously not a privacy violation, since it only took photographs of things in public view. But others felt they should be able to go out in public and not worry about some random picture of them (say, leaving a chiropractor’s office) permanently in a Google database.

I had some sympathy for both sides, but ultimately more for the latter. I think it’s one thing when, say, a single photographer on Flickr takes a photograph of someone incidentally with no personally identifiable information. “Permissions culture” has gone to such extremes that it seems unfair to burden shutterbugs with obligations to get clearances from anyone they shoot–and even in this case, there are some limits internationally (“In Québec, a teenage girl successfully sued a photographer for $8,000 after he took her picture without her knowledge, even though she was sitting on the front steps of a public building.”).

But the case of a Google or Yahoo!, with immense, cross-checkable databases, is another matter altogether. We know that government has sought extensive access to these databases. Face recognition technology may reach a point where any image can be traced back to a name or number. I think it safe to assume that just about any surveillance technology applied by the private sector can eventually be coopted by the government if a security threat becomes pressing.

So should we cheer on claims like “intrusion upon seclusion” against Google Street View? I’m not willing to say that, because we have yet to see exactly how it’s being used. (Sadly, we may never get that information from Google, because the company may call it a trade secret.) But I do hope for two things:

1) A realization that technology like this is not simply a product of Google, but can be put to many ends by a security apparatus willing to force corporations to ignore existing privacy laws. We may well want to go in the direction of London’s CCTV, but we should have some architecture for regulating that transition. Someone has to be able to watch the watchers.

2) Some reflection on the types of public activity that are likely to decline when “all the world’s a stage.” Sure, we can catch people robbing banks more easily (or exiting strip clubs); but what happens to protest? Will people think twice about going to an anti-war demonstration if they know the whole thing will be captured, forever, by entities unaccountable to them? On a less political level, will everyday life become more and more a “new American performing reality?” Perhaps Goffman’s idea of the “stage” is about to be extended to every public street in America.

  June 19, 2007 at 10:02 am   Posted in: Google & Search Engines, Privacy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Privacy (Law Enforcement), Technology   Print This Post   7 Comments

Law, Foreign Norms and Social Order (Or, How I Survived A Naples Soccer Celebration)

posted by Dave Hoffman

Hello again from Rome.

Last weekend, when returning from Sorento/Capri to Rome via Naples, I was forced to confront the relationship between norms, law and order in an unexpected context. Naples has just emerged from a debilitating garbage strike. Even when not mired in its filth, I don’t think the City is known for its cleanliness or a general ambience of security. Indeed, when we had passed through earlier in the weekend, I noticed that cab we were in obeyed the relevant traffic lights, signals and lines only at random intervals. Fine by me, but bad for the mopeds we pushed onto the sidewalks.

Now Italy has one of the highest car accident rates in Europe. (And the system for resolving accidents is Byzantine.) I wondered whether this accident rate was a result of legal/institutional design (bad comparative negligence rules, for example) or a bad compliance regime (a lack of a contingency fee system) or bad norms. Lacking data, I imagined that most accidents occurred between Italian and non-Italian drivers, because Italian drivers are all following the same set of informal traffic norms, in turn validated by Italian negligence rules, that help them to decide the optimal time to cross four lanes of traffic against a red light.

But I digress. The real news from Naples came when our ferry was about to dock in its port. A ruckus had erupted. Apparently, Naples tied with Genova in a soccer match, resulting in both teams being promoted to Series A soccer, or the major league. This led to a general “celebration” consisting of an impromptu “parade” of thousands of mopeds and cars, flags flying and horns blaring, with the occasional firework (or pistol?) thrown into the mix. I expressed some doubt then and now about the celebratory atmosphere not just because there were some random acts of violence against Genovese fans, but because the scene was decidedly chaotic. I also question whether a parade can occur simultaneously on every main street in town.

Here, again, the naive foreign tourist might think to himself that the law had broken down, resulting in a potentially bad situation, a view itself reinforced by a Napolese citizens who told that tourist that it was “very dangerous” to walk to the train station. But a more realistic analysis demonstrated that so long as that tourist walked at a brisk pace while shouting “Forza Napoli” at intervals, he could effectively comply with the new set of norms and not be sanctioned by passing celebrants. Plus, I hailed a cab halfway through the walk.

All of which is to say that this trip is reminding me vividly that much of what we think of as law – the rules that permit us to be social – bears only some relationship to the formal instructions written down. It is much easier to see this when you are out of the Matrix. (A Moneylaw argument for hiring foreigners on the entry-level hiring market, on the theory that they are best positioned to do transformative legal scholarship.)

Next time I’m online, I promise to post something about the Xoxohth lawsuit. As a teaser, you may be interested to read this thread by Xoxohth co-founder and owner Jarrett Cohen.

  June 19, 2007 at 2:46 am   Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law   Print This Post   4 Comments

Where Repeat Where Are the SCOTUS School Cases ** The World Wonders

posted by Mike O'Shea

Another SCOTUS opinion day without decisions in PICS v. Seattle Sch. Dist. and Meredith v. Jefferson County, the big Fourteenth Amendment challenges to officials’ use of race in assigning students to the Seattle and Louisville public schools. Informed speculation identifies Chief Justice Roberts as the likely author of the majority opinion — or at least as having assigned himself the draft majority opinion at conference. It’s been six and a half months now since argument.

Different possible reasons for the wait: (1) someone flipped after the draft was circulated, requiring the 5-4 draft majority to be rewritten as a dissent, and vice-versa; (2) the Court has splintered, yielding a mere plurality opinion plus a crowd of separate writings; (3) one or more Justices is working up an unusually thorough, blockbuster dissent to read from the bench; and/or (4) (the least likely) the Chief Justice is taking extra time to work up an unusually thorough, blockbuster majority opinion that not only strikes down the school programs but reaches out to abrogate the 5-4 opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, the SCOTUS precedent closest to the issues in PICS and Meredith.

Or maybe they’ve just been busy clearing out less high-profile cases, like today’s three.

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  June 18, 2007 at 7:14 pm   Posted in: Supreme Court   Print This Post   5 Comments

Texting and Talking: The New Smoking?

posted by Brannon Denning

It is a commonplace to note the degree to which technology enables us to stay “connected” to family, work, etc. What I find fascinating is not only how common it is to see folks talking and texting, but how many people instinctively reach for their phone and begin talking, texting, or both when faced with any sort of enforced idleness. It reminds me a bit of Brian Doyle-Murray’s character in Christmas Vacation when he doesn’t want Clark Griswold in his office anymore. He picks up the phone and growls, “Get me somebody. Anybody.”

I think cell phones and Blackberrys have replaced cigarettes as our response to these sorts of unanticipated waits. One sign that talking and texting may be the new smoking: signs asking folks to turn off their cell phones before entering places like doctor’s offices.

  June 18, 2007 at 1:14 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   31 Comments

International Readers’ Survey: Antitrust

posted by Frank Pasquale

Daniel Sokol has asked me to link to his post surveying which countries teach antitrust in law school (or equivalent educational institutions). Please comment there if you have information on the topic.

  June 17, 2007 at 7:04 pm   Posted in: Antitrust   Print This Post   One Comment

Abizaid to Taguba: Stop Snitchin’

posted by Frank Pasquale

Law and order types have been upset by the “stop snitchin’” phenomenon in American inner cities for some time. But as Alexandra Napatoff has noted, the “urban criminal entrepreneurs” who claim “that friends don’t snitch on friends” may well be as much a product as an enemy of current law enforcement practices. Sherrilynn Ifill has also insightfully commented on the wider cultural trend to “stop whistleblowin’,” and has suggested some basic protections that need to be in place:

Whistleblowers, whether in urban communities or in the government, are more inclined to speak out if they have assurances of protection, if they feel that their actions will be supported and corroborated by other members of their community, and if they trust the people or organizations with whom they share their confidential information.

Given the following exchange between General Abizaid and General Taguba after the publication of the latter’s report on Abu Ghraib, let’s hope the Army becomes more interested in the issue:

A few weeks after his report became public, Taguba, who was still in Kuwait, was in the back seat of a Mercedes sedan with Abizaid. Abizaid’s driver and his interpreter, who also served as a bodyguard, were in front. Abizaid turned to Taguba and issued a quiet warning: “You and your report will be investigated.”

“I wasn’t angry about what he said but disappointed that he would say that to me,” Taguba said. “I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia.”

Seymour Hersh reports the Taguba story here.

  June 17, 2007 at 6:31 pm   Posted in: Administrative Law, Criminal Law, Culture, Current Events   Print This Post   3 Comments

Black Boxes Bite Back

posted by Frank Pasquale

As interest rates jump, piggybacking has become all the rage in “credit repair” circles. For a fee, groups like Instant Credit Builders will let you “borrow” (part of) another person’s credit score by becoming an “authorized borrower” on his cards. Here is ICB’s overheated defense of the practice:

ICB has developed a system to counter the harmful societal impacts of an emerging market called “subprime lending”. Mob-like blood suckers under the umbrella of legitimate lending institutions are targeting those who have poor credit scores but fall short of being beyond credit risk acceptance.

To explain why subprime lenders are in such an opportunistic industry, take this example: The commission payable to a financial adviser or mortgage broker from an actual prime lender on a $100,000 deal yields a broker about $250. Yet the same $100,000 deal using a subprime lender yields them $2,000 to $2,500. This niche market banking industry is getting paid well to enslave most minorities, low-income borrowers, even victims of identity theft with interest rates that can be up to 3.5% higher than average.

Needless to say, mortgage lenders are hoppin’ mad. The godfather of credit scores, FICO, has claimed that “piggy-backing will soon come to an end on its watch.” One irony here is that, as lenders crack down, “they may actually increase demand for some of the services that these Web sites offer.”

A lot of the commentary on these sites has been harsh, but let me offer something like an “unclean hands” defense. Credit scores have long come under attack for having a “a disparate impact on poor and minority populations.” Moreover, the scoring is opaque; scorers claim that transparency would undermine their “trade secrets.” So consumers are navigating a world where they can have only a vague idea of the rules. Lenders shouldn’t be surprised when entrepreneurs reverse-engineer the ratings system and the technology bites back.

Moreover, these rules themselves may be self-fulfilling prophecies: if you decree that one missed $10 payment for a family of 4 earning $30,000 per year lowers their credit score by 200 points, they probably are going to end up being more likely to default because they are going to be paying much more in interest for any financing they get. Again, because the scores are black boxes, we have no assurance that the companies that offer them try to eliminate such endogenicity or whether they actually try to profit from such self-fulfilling prophecies.

As long as credit ratings are so shrouded in secrecy, the lenders who rely on them should expect gaming of the system. Watch for a debate over “black hat” vs. “white hat” credit repair builders as controversial (and interminable) as that now occurring in the world of search engine optimization.

  June 16, 2007 at 1:39 pm   Posted in: Consumer Protection Law, Economic Analysis of Law, Google & Search Engines, Intellectual Property, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Technology   Print This Post   No Comments

Civil Rights Trials as Transitional Justice

posted by Brannon Denning

Yesterday’s conviction of a former Klan member in the previously unsolved killings of two teens in the 1960s is the latest in what seems to be a series of attempts to crack cold cases from the civil rights era before even more witnesses and suspects die off. My colleague at Cumberland, Don Cochran, was part of the prosecution team that secured the conviction of Bobby Frank Cherry, who was involved in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church here in Birmingham.

Don has written a wonderful essay about the trial, and his role in it, entitled Ghosts of Alabama: The Prosecution of Bobby Frank Cherry for the Bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, 12 Mich. J. Race & L. 1 (2006) (I can’t find a copy online). In the conclusion, Don posits that the Cherry trial, and civil rights trials in general can be understood as a form of “transitional justice,” a term taken from international law describing the processes (trials, lustration, truth commisssions, etc.) by which regimes transitioning from authoritarian to democratic governments attempt to expose, and come to terms with, the past. I think that the concept of transitional justice is a fascinating lens through which to view these trials, and I think it can help furnish an answer to the question Don says he frequently gets: “What is the use of trying and convicting these old men decades after these crimes have been committed?”

  June 15, 2007 at 3:53 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   2 Comments

So You Wanna Be a Law Professor, Part II

posted by Brannon Denning

First, thanks so much to everyone who made comments to my previous post, which asked for things you’d like to see in a book about the faculty hiring process. I’m knee-deep in summer school, so while I can’t respond individually to each comment, please know that I appreciate each one and all will be helpful as we continue writing the book. I am pleased to see that we have, so far, anticipated many of the topics that you wanted to see covered.

Many comments asked what the chances are for someone who attended a non-elite law school to break into the teaching market. Since that seemed to be a common theme, I thought I’d offer “Becoming a Law Professor: The Nutshell.”

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  June 15, 2007 at 3:23 pm   Posted in: Uncategorized   Print This Post   10 Comments

Quick Technical Update

posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger

The latest wave of spam appears to have been canned, thanks to the highly useful C-Code anti-spam plugin available at Alogblog. (And thanks for the tip about the plug-in, Cathy Gellis!)

As always, with any technical update, there’s the possibility of new errors. If anyone has trouble commenting, please let me know. (I already know of an error that previously caused comments to fail when using the comment-preview button — that one is now, as far as I know, fixed.) Happy commenting!

  June 13, 2007 at 7:23 pm   Posted in: Administrative Announcements   Print This Post   One Comment

FBI Plans Data Mining Project

posted by Daniel Solove

Several years ago, the Department of Defense began developing a program called Total Information Awareness, a massive data mining project analyzing personal information on every citizen of the United States. After a series of blistering op-eds and strong negative public reaction, the Senate voted to stop all funding for the program.

But now, it appears, that the FBI is dreaming up a similar program. According to the AP:

The FBI wants to compile a massive computer database and analyze it for clues to unmask terrorist sleeper cells.

Two congressmen are worried about whether the bureau will protect the privacy of U.S. citizens.

Reps. Brad Miller, D-N.C., and James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., the chairman and ranking Republican on the House Science and Technology investigations subcommittee, asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate the proposal. Their June 4 letter to GAO was released Tuesday.

Miller and Sensenbrenner questioned both the FBI’s ability to properly manage such a large trove of data and whether predictive data-mining even works or just falsely casts suspicion on innocent people.

The FBI is seeking $12 million in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 for its Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force to set up a National Security Branch Analysis Center, with 59 employees, including 23 contractors and five FBI agents.

Justice Department budget documents submitted to Congress predict the center will hold 6 billion records by 2012 and “the universe of subjects will expand exponentially.” That would equal “20 separate ‘records’ for each man, woman and child in the United States,” the congressmen wrote.

I’m generally not a fan of government data mining programs. Thus far, I don’t think that the case has been made to justify the expenditure of resources for such programs; nor has the case been made to justify the cost in terms of burdens to privacy and liberty. For more about my views, see my recent essay, Data Mining and the Security-Liberty Debate, written for an upcoming symposium on surveillance for the U. Chicago Law Review. The symposium website is here.

The letter by the congressmen to the GAO is available here.

Hat tip: Privacy.org

  June 13, 2007 at 3:29 pm   Posted in: Privacy, Privacy (Law Enforcement), Privacy (National Security)   Print This Post   One Comment

More on Quasi-Official Policies of Not Prosecuting Polygamists

posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger

From a fascinating Reuters article:

The attorneys general of Utah and Arizona said in separate interviews they had no intention of prosecuting polygamists unless they commit other crimes such as taking underage brides — a practice authorities said was rampant in a Utah-Arizona border community run by Warren Jeffs before his arrest in August.

“We are not going to go out there and persecute people for their beliefs,” said Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard.

Adds Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff: “We determined six or seven years ago that there was no way we could prosecute 10,000 polygamists and put the kids into foster care. There’s no way that we have the money or the resources to do that.”

I can see why pragmatic considerations would weigh against broad criminal enforcement here. It kinda sounds like the widespread pre-Lawrence environment of mostly non-prosecution of stand-alone violation of anti-sodomy laws. I wonder if that’s a sign of the eventual fate of criminal bigamy laws . . .

  June 13, 2007 at 4:48 am   Posted in: Criminal Law, Religion   Print This Post   21 Comments

The AutoAdmit Lawsuit

posted by Daniel Solove

Ever since the Washington Post exposé about the AutoAdmit discussion board, it has been in a downward tailspin. According to the Washington Post article of March 2007:

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa, has published in top legal journals and completed internships at leading institutions in her field. So when the Yale law student interviewed with 16 firms for a job this summer, she was concerned that she had only four call-backs. She was stunned when she had zero offers.

Though it is difficult to prove a direct link, the woman thinks she is a victim of a new form of reputation-maligning: online postings with offensive content and personal attacks that can be stored forever and are easily accessible through a Google search.

The woman and two others interviewed by The Washington Post learned from friends that they were the subject of derogatory chats on a widely read message board on AutoAdmit, run by a third-year law student at the University of Pennsylvania and a 23-year-old insurance agent. The women spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution online.

For excellent background about AutoAdmit, check out these posts (here, here, and here) by our own David Hoffman, the world’s leading scholar of vitriolic law school discussion boards.

A short while ago, Anthony Ciolli (the Penn law student who helped run the board) had his offer of employment rescinded at a law firm.

The latest — a complaint filed against a number of people associated with AutoAdmit by two law students who claim that their “character, intelligence, appearance and sexual lives have been thoroughly trashed by the defendants.” The case is Doe v. Ciolli, 307CV00909 CFD, and the complaint has been filed in the District of Connecticut. The complaint claims the following causes of action: copyright infringement, appropriation of name or likeness, public disclosure of private facts, false light, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligent infliction of emotional distress, and defamation.

The WSJ blog has more about the story here. According to the WSJ blog:

“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. Rosen is joined by Mark A. Lemley, of counsel at San Francisco litigation boutique Keker & Van Nest and a professor at Stanford Law School who teaches computer and internet law. They are taking the case pro bono. Here, they have posted a notification on the lawsuit on AutoAdmit.

Eric Goldman offers thoughtful observations here. And there’s more info at Above the Law. Eugene Volokh has an interesting post about the case here.

The issues in this case are of great interest to me, as I have a book forthcoming this October called The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet (Yale U. Press, Oct. 2007).

  June 12, 2007 at 7:30 pm   Posted in: Privacy (Gossip & Shaming)   Print This Post   6 Comments

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