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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. "
No; Cooley hired lawyers who had graduated from Georgetown and Michigan. (Both excellent schools.) They did this to go after a blogger who was claiming something bad about Cooley. The poster is implicitly pointing out that they did not trust Cooley graduates to bring their lawsuit.
To be fair, I would much prefer GULC (Georgetown) or Michigan grads. Georgetown's great for practicality, depth of curriculum, non-profit work, and DC connectedness. Michigan is great for Academia, just a notch behind Yale, really, and more like Yale than Harvard. Both have great students.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Cooley, a law school I've never heard of, claimed to be the 2nd highest rated law school in the country. They got pissed when someone called BS. They hired lawyers from a couple of well-known law schools and sued the guy. This lead to us average joes hearing about it.
In other words, a bunch of scumbag cunts are writhing around like snakes in a pit trying to kill each other and a crowd is gathering.
Real Americans should pitch in by gathering up other cunt lawyers and throwing them into the same pit. That way we can burn them all with less impact on the environment.
I am not a lawyer and i would be very offended if anyone claimed that i am.
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).
Honestly, I think the term's fallen out of use because so goddamn many suits are the result of this tactic now.
See, now that's how you write a summary.
You are welcome on my lawn.