In case there's anyone who reads this site before checking the gossip on Leiter's site, the latest in the AutoAdmit/XOXOHTH saga is reported today on the Wall Street Journal's law blog: Two law students have sued Anthony Ciolli, the former "chief educational director" of the site, along with about two dozen anonymous posters. The lawsuit claims a variety of privacy torts (false light, public exposure of private facts), defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and copyright infringement (for posting pictures without consent). The complaint is posted here; an amusing aspect is the naming of the anonymous defendants not as John Does, but by their screen names (including gems like "Dean_Harold_Koh" and "remember when I said I'd kill you last? I lied").
One of the next moves in the plaintiffs' game is probably a subpoena to the host of the site, seeking identifying information on the named defendants. I'm no cyberlawyer, but the plaintiffs in this case are represented by one of the best -- Mark Lemley, of Stanford Law School. (There's a long thread already going on AutoAdmit, in which numerous posters disparage the lawyers for the plaintiffs.) I'm pretty sure the host in this case will give up the information, so the next step will be public identification of law students who have "joked" about raping women and made racist comments that would offend Michael Richards and Don Imus. The "can't you take a joke?" defense is unlikely to play well with employers who, as I've noted previously, take concepts like judgment and maturity quite seriously in hiring associates.
At the risk of stating the obvious: Hey law students, if you would be unwilling to walk into the office of the hiring partner of a law firm and explain why you said _______, don't put it in an email or a posting on a message board. The AutoAdmit episode is just one of many stories that can be told about anonymous "joking" comments that have become public and led to extremely unpleasant consequences for the careers of lawyers.
UPDATE: Eugene Volokh has a good analysis of the constitutionality of some of the claims in the lawsuit, and also underscores the point I've been making, which is that as long as the lawsuit gets beyond the motion to dismiss stage, the identity of these anonymous posters is going to come out. At that point, the downside risk is not just paying damages, but being permanently unemployable as a lawyer.
UPDATE: Just to be clear, I'm not expressing a view on the merits of the lawsuit. The point of this post is: (1) As a matter of ethics -- by which I mean real ethics, not the rules of professional conduct -- people ought to take responsibility for their speech. Taking responsibility means owning up to your authorship of a statement, and being willing to stand behind it, endorse it, and associate yourself, your character, and your reputation with it. (2) There may be good reasons why we don't embody that principle of ethical responsibility in a legal prohibition on making certain kinds of statements (disgusting racial epithets, for example) or speaking anonymously. These reasons are familiar -- fear of state power to define orthodox beliefs, due process concerns like vagueness and overbreadth, concerns about chilling dissenting speech, and so on. (3) To the extent state bar character and fitness committees think their job is to evaluate the ethical character of applicants, they're going to take into account irresponsible conduct, quite apart from whether it's legally actionable. (3A) I think (3) is a lamentable state of affairs, particularly since admission to practice is a valuable state-conferred privilege, but nobody asked me. (4) Whatever we think about (3), there's no question that private employers can making hiring decisions on the basis of the candidate's history of irresponsible behavior. (5) Given all that, if someone is motivated to file a lawsuit -- as these two plaintiffs obviously were -- and there is enough legal merit to get past a motion to dismiss, it is highly likely that the identity of people making "anonymous" statements on a public forum will be revealed, and bad consequences (3) and (4) may happen to people posting stuff that might be protected speech for First Amendment purposes. The current state of postings on AutoAdmit suggest that some people still haven't figured this out.