National Jurist - October 2007 - (Page 9) NEWS AutoAdmit.com under fire AutoAdmit.com, which bills itself as “the most prestigious law school admissions discussion board in the world,” has recently come under fire from News reports by several sources who say Michelle Weyenberg they have been victims of defamatory and threatening remarks on the site. The ongoing scandal is sparking new clashes between free speech and privacy. Most recently, two Yale Law School students 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 slanderous remarks about them on the online law school discussion forum. The lawsuit was filed in June in the U.S. District Court in Connecticut. One of the unidentified Yale law students said she was stunned when she had zero summer job offers after interviewing with 16 law firms. She later found out from a friend that she was the subject of derogatory chats on the site. Jarret Cohen, a 23-year-old insurance broker in Allentown, Pa., who founded AutoAdmit and currently runs the site, did not respond to a request for comment. He told the Washington Post in March that the site merely provides a forum for free speech. “I want it to be a place where people can express themselves freely, just as if they were to go to a town square and say whatever brilliant or foolish thoughts they have,” he said But others disagree. Nell Newton, dean of the University of California Hastings School of the Law, said speech actions do have consequences. Hastings staff and students got quite a scare back in April after a threat was discovered on the AutoAdmit site just two days after the Virginia Tech shootings. “[Students] don’t seem to understand that something they put online could come back to haunt them in their professional life,” she said. “I feel strongly that we should always make that distinction between true censorship and just the operating of the legitimate marketplace.” Employers, including law firms, frequently search Google as part of a due diligence check on prospective employees, said David Hoffman, a law professor at Temple University who has conducted research on AutoAdmit. The trend spawned a new service, ReputationDefender, whose mission is to search for damaging content online and destroy it on behalf of their clients. The company is currently on a litigation effort on behalf of some people who have been attacked on AutoAdmit.com. Michael Fertik, chief executive of ReputationDefender, says they are the first, and so far only online reputation privacy management company in the world. Newton said after visiting AutoAdmit for the first time she couldn’t believe what she saw. “It was the most amazing experience of my adult life,” she said. “I saw the incredibly sick postings that people freely make on AutoAdmit. I was shaking with anger and disgust at these explicitly violent sexual references. It was just stunning to me.” Hoffman says the site always seemed like an odd place for law students to spend their time. In his blog, Concurring Opinions, in which he explored the popularity of AutoAdmit, Hoffman found it hard to know what to make of the varied claims on why so many students and lawyers spend time on the site. “I admit that I would have thought that the preponderance of racist and sexist talk would have greater adverse effects on traffic, and wouldn’t have anticipated the network effects of traffic flow that appear to continue to drive the board’s popularity,” he said. “On the other hand, I realize that there exists a continuing strong demand for information about the legal employment market. Why that demand has been met by this type of forum rather than a more orthodox and commercial entity, is an interesting problem.” release. “Opening a conservative, Christian law school will fill a niche in the state of Louisiana, and also the nation.” He said the college wants to have as many as 40 students in the first year and grow to 300. Louisiana College is affiliated with the Louisiana Baptist Convention, which elects its trustees. Like the SBC, the school has shifted in recent years to a more conservative stance, and some faculty members complained academic freedom was being curtailed. Aguillard said the law school is currently seeking accreditation with the American Bar Association. As for Husson College, the Bangor school is one step closer to operating the state’s second law school. Continued Two universities propose law schools Baptist-affiliated Louisiana College and Maine’s Husson College are both close to establishing new law schools. Louisianna College hopes to open the new “biblical” Judge Paul Pressler School of Law in 2009 — named after the Texas appeals-court judge better known for leading the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. College President Joe Aguillard said the goal is to train and equip young men and women to view the practice of law through a biblical worldview. “Founding a law school is a monumental undertaking but one that we are working on diligently,” Aguillard said in a press 9 THE NATIONAL JURIST October 2007 http://www.AutoAdmit.com http://www.AutoAdmit.com http://www.AutoAdmit.com
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