Ernest Gomez | Law students behaving badly

The only thing worse than an angry Internet mob is an angry Internet mob of bored, petty law students.

A young woman at Yale Law School learned this lesson the hard way, and her professional reputation may have suffered permanent damage as a result. She was the subject of insulting posts on AutoAdmit.com, an Internet message board for current and prospective law students.

Many users anonymously posted sexually degrading remarks, attacks on her academic credentials and implications of illegal behavior by her family.

The student, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate, received zero offers from her 16 summer-job interviewers. In response, the student hired the assistance of ReputationDefender, a company that removes defaming personal information on the Internet.

While some of the posts pertaining to the student have been removed from AutoAdmit, the Web site's founders, insurance agent Jarret Cohen and third-year Penn Law student Anthony Ciolli, defended their users' postings as free speech.

"I want [AutoAdmit] 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," Cohen told The Washington Post in a March 7 article.

Brilliant and foolish, indeed. While the Web site contains helpful information for law students and law-school applicants, there are dozens of discussion threads on the site that contain blatantly sexist, racist, homophobic and otherwise bigoted remarks.

Nonetheless, Cohen is right. Web sites are not legally accountable for posts made by site visitors, and user anonymity prevents targeted students from suing for defamation. This leaves little relief for targets of online attacks.

In a letter to the "Yale Law School Community," Dean Harold Koh recognized that members of the school were being publicly defamed on AutoAdmit: "These malicious attacks, as well as racist, sexist and homophobic speech, have no place in the Yale Law School community."

Unfortunately, such speech will continue to be a part of the Yale Law School community and any community of seemingly bright young people. Sites like AutoAdmit facilitate this further by providing a veil of anonymity.

I would not argue against the right to free speech; it's futile to ask a group of outspoken individuals to change the way they express themselves. In fact, I found many of the posts on AutoAdmit so outlandish and offensive that I had a good laugh - it was like watching a trashy Comedy Central show, but with law students instead of foul-mouthed cartoon characters.

Now that it has entered the public eye, law students have a responsibility - not to the law, not to AutoAdmit, but to their schools and their profession.

The Ponemon Institute, a privacy-research group, conducted a survey last December and found that about half of U.S. employers use the Internet in evaluating job applicants; about one-third of the searches provided information used to deny an offer.

While recruiters probably don't care what a student puts on his or her Facebook profile, direct attacks on an individual's character from multiple sources that appear during a Google search can have a substantial effect.

When a decorated individual goes zero for sixteen in job interviews, slander may have likely affected the student's employment opportunities (or it provided a scapegoat for incompetence). Either way, it seems backward for the brightest law students in country to be engaging in third-grade gossip and working to bring down their peers in a public forum.

In a letter to the Penn Law School Community, Dean Gary Clinton reminded students of the real possibility of losing employment over information on the Web. "Freedom of speech is an overarching value to all of us. But the use of self-restraint is no assault on that freedom," Clinton wrote.

A visit to AutoAdmit showed me a discussion entitled "Which female [Yale Law School] students would you sodomize?" At the top of the web page I see "AutoAdmit: The most prestigious law school discussion board in the world."

Thanks to irresponsible users and overreaction by the media (I've done my part), this statement is both sad and true.

Ernest Gomez is an Engineering and Wharton junior from Beverly Hill, Calif. His e-mail address is gomez@dailypennsylvanian.com. Please, Call Me Ted appears on alternate Tuesdays.

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