Testing the limits of forum bashing

Testing the limits of forum bashing: two law students sue over personal attacks: By Jacqui Cheng

Two law school students filed a lawsuit against the administrator of a web site and 28 of the site's users last week for psychological and economic injury. The two plaintiffs, anonymously listed as Doe I and Doe II, are female students at Yale Law School and claim that the users of a third-party law school message board have consistently and regularly made such disparaging remarks about their characters that it has cost them not only their emotional wellbeing, but internships and jobs. And despite repeated requests to remove the offensive posts, the site's administrators continually refused to do so....

Ciolli and the AutoAdmit gang may not exactly have precedent on their side either. A student blogger from UC Berkeley recently lost a defamation case brought against him by journalist Lee Kaplan last week. The student, Yaman Salahi, had set up a blog called Lee Kaplan Watch in which Salahi cited articles written by Kaplan and publicly disputed various claims. Kaplan sued Salahi for business interference and libel, which Salahi lost in small claims court not once, but twice. On his blog, Salahi argues that because he was sued in small claims court and not a "real" court, he was unable to take advantage of California's anti-SLAPP—Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation—protections. "I have absolutely no doubt that had this lawsuit been filed in a real court, I would have won," Salahi wrote.

Doe I and II are asking for punitive damages in the amount of $245,000 as well as unspecified actual and special damages. The complaint also requests that the threads be permanently removed from AutoAdmit and that the administrators authorize Google to permanently remove cached versions of the threads.

Some experts believe that this case will go a long way towards testing the legal limits of anonymous Internet postings. University of Texas law professor Brian Leiter told Reuters that "the most vile posters on that board are two subpoenas away from being outed," which he says led to "much amusement" by AutoAdmit posters. "But they are about to find out that this is how it works," he added ominously.

Needless to say, this is already getting plenty of attention on the blogosphere.
Maybe the students can be represented by Robert Bork, now that he's more open to tort actions, especially those involving Yale.