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Law School Amplifies Critics Through SLAPP Suit
An anonymous reader writes "Michigan's Thomas M. Cooley Law School recently filed a lawsuit that appears to be boomeranging in the worst possible way. A little-noticed pseudonymous blogger respectfully disagreed with Cooley's self-awarded number-2 ranking, nationwide (well, perhaps not so respectfully), and had a few other choice things to say. So, Cooley went ahead and hired some lawyers (who had graduated from Georgetown and the University of Michigan) to file a lawsuit to unmask the blogger. And EFF cooperating attorney John Hermann got involved. "
Can someone please make sense of that summary. All I can gather is a law school is suing a blogger from Georgetown?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
As a little background, Cooley is ranked by US News and World Report as one of the worst law schools in the country; it's reputation among lawyers is pretty much the same, I believe. I've read the lawsuit and actually they probably have a decent case against 3 of the 4 defendants if the statements they made were true (very specific statements about them being under investigation, for example, are not protected as opinion). As for hurting their reputation, in my opinion their reputation is sufficiently bad that this lawsuit isn't really going to make it any worse. Kind of a funny side note, Cooley doesn't like that reputation so they created their own rankings system using supposedly "objective" standards where they ranked themselves #2, or ahead of every other law school in the country (including Yale, which is generally considered to be the best, noticeably outranking even Harvard). The standards they picked, of course, are ones that will rank them highly even though they don't really have anything to do with academic excellence (number of students, number of books in the library, number of seats in the library (seriously), total area of the law school).
If the school were any good, wouldn't it sue with its own graduates instead of those from highly respected schools?
Nobody's posted this yet so it's worth a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect . Basically, when your complaint about a tiny amount of publicity attracts a huge amount of publicity, you've made a mistake.
Honestly, I think the term's fallen out of use because so goddamn many suits are the result of this tactic now.
They'll be back on the bar scene in 3 years, unemployable with $200k in debt. You should buy them a few drinks.
Are you kidding in your subject line? Signing away first amendment rights is a common practice. Security Clearances, employment agreements, settlement agreements, nondisclosure agreements, all kinds of things let you sign away your rights. (Though consult a lawyer if it matters to you in a particular situation, obviously.)
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
_
1. The real, central, issue here is actually much broader than Cooley. It involves what some (like PayPal co-founder and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel) have started describing as a "higher education bubble" or a "student loan bubble" -- after comparing trends in debt-financed education, to the recent collapse of the housing bubble. If the predicted collapse materializes (and the jury is out on whether it will), then you tell me whether Cooley has improved or harmed its chances to keep a low profile when stuff hits the fan. It is certainly premature, today, to predict who might be viewed, in a few months or a few years, to be the Angelo Mozillo or the Countrywide of the education industry. But you are invited to consider this subject, investigate the facts for yourself, and to make up your own mind.
2. The next level down is a phenomenon that has been called "The Streisand Effect" -- a phrase coined by TechDirt's Mike Masnick to encapsulate the paradoxical observation that lawsuits seeking to suppress expression on the Internet, routinely seem to backfire, and often result in the viral amplification of the messages of critics, rather than the result sought by companies like Cooley. Incidentally, the initial submission (which was edited a bit by Timothy) asked an additional question, which Timothy omitted, which is this: Is the example of Cooley's backfiring lawsuit such a good example of this phenomenon, the we might even want to consider updating Masnick's neologism to "The Cooley Effect," rather than "The Streisand Effect?" Personally, I vote for "The Cooley Effect."
3. The lawsuit was actually against several individuals who published material on the Internet. The principal blogger (whose handle is Rockstar05), went to Cooley and can speak from direct experience about what it is like to be a Cooley student. The blogger is a classic dis-satisfied customer. Rockstar05, at least based on published accounts, transferred out of Cooley in order to attend some other law school. The lawsuit has been filed *against* the blogger, and has been filed by two lawyers at the Miller, Canfield, law firm, at the request of Cooley law school. It is helpful to keep track of who is doing what -- the blogger used to be from Cooley, and probably had nothing to do with Georgetown. One of the blogger's adversaries, trying to unmask him or her, graduated from Georgetown University Law Center.
4. One of the delicious and subtle ironies, in this case, is how Cooley (which, presumably, had a lot of lawyers to choose among, because Cooley generates a lot of revenue and can pay top dollar) elected not to hire one of its own graduates, but rather a pair of lawyers who graduated from other programs that Cooley's own promotional literature routinely purports to rank lower than Cooley. This is a very minor issue, and I'm sorry if that's what got you confused. It is just too amusing not to point out.
5. The other, much bigger, policy issue that needs to be addressed, is truth-in-admissions standards not just for law schools, but for higher education, generally. You can decide for yourself whether Cooley's information practices toward prospective students (including, but hardly limited to, the "Cooley Rankings" issued for the past 12 years), actually meet the standards that
For a good laugh, have a look at the blatantly cherry-picked ranking system they built for themselves:
http://www.cooley.edu/rankings/search/report-byschool.php
Now select Harvard, Yale or whatever you think are actual good schools and do the comparison... Well, whaddaya know! Cooley comes out first overall, as well first in such important metrics as:
* Foreign National Enrollment
* Part-Time Faculty
* First-Year Section Size
* Library Hours per Week with Professional Staff
* Library Seating Capacity
* Law School Square Footage Excluding Library
* Total Law School Square Footage
* Number of States in which Graduates Employed
Here's the kicker: Percentage of Graduates Employed is only 78.8%, meaning you are roughly twice as likely as the average person in this country to be unemployed after having graduated from their program! But the median of all their useless metrics puts them at number one, because their ranking system gives equal weight to Library Seating Capacity as Percentage of Graduates Employed.
Are you kidding in your subject line? Signing away first amendment rights is a common practice. Security Clearances, employment agreements, settlement agreements, nondisclosure agreements, all kinds of things let you sign away your rights. (Though consult a lawyer if it matters to you in a particular situation, obviously.)
This is spot on. The issue is that one cannot be forced to forfeit their 1st amendment rights, however, if one willingly and voluntarily signed a contract to forfeit their 1st amendment rights in some way, then that contract can be enforced in court.
Now, there are certain unconscionable conditions for contracts that you cannot do. You cannot contract to consent to slavery, as well you cannot consent to be intentionally killed. (You can however consent to be involved in potentially lethal physical combat, so long as all reasonable precautions against death are taken. This is how boxing works.) However, "freedom of speech" is not an inalienable right.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS