This recent Washington Post article focuses on a Yale Law School student who believes that false derogatory statements about her personal life posted on a anonymous internet chat site prevented her from getting any offers for summer associate jobs. The article has generated a major blogosphere debate about the dangers of anonymous commentary on the internet (e.g. here, here, and co-conspirator Randy Barnett here).
Most of the commentators appear to assume that the YLS student is right to believe that her failure to get an offer was caused by the chat site posts. I am not so sure. According to the Post:
[The student] graduated Phi Beta Kappa, has published in top legal journals and completed internships at leading institutions in her field. So when the Yale law student interviewed with 16 firms for a job this summer, she was concerned that she had only four call-backs. She was stunned when she had zero offers.
Though it is difficult to prove a direct link, the woman thinks she is a victim of a new form of reputation-maligning: online postings with offensive content and personal attacks that can be stored forever and are easily accessible through a Google search.
I sympathize with her dilemma, but I doubt that it was caused by the chat site. How do I know? Because the same thing happened to me! Like this person, when I interviewed for law firm summer associate jobs as a second year student at Yale, I had "graduated Phi Beta Kappa [from my undergrad institution], ha[d] published in top legal journals and completed internships at leading institutions in [my] field." And, very similar to her, after interviewing at a dozen big DC firms, I ended up with two call backs and zero offers. Why did this happen? Frantic later investigation showed that the main culprits were precisely some of the credentials listed above. Because of them (particularly the publications), firms feared that I would go into academia and either never take a permanent job with the firm, or leave after just a year or two. A highly paid associate who quickly jumps ship for academia is far less profitable for a firm than one that stays for several years and can eventually bill hours as a senior associate.
Of course, I don't know for sure that what happened to me also happened to the student discussed in the article. But, in addition to the issue of her publications in "top law journals," there are two other reasons to doubt that the chat site comments played a decisive role. First, most people know that anonymous comments on chat sites are often inaccurate, and intelligent employers are unlikely to give them great credence - especially if doing so leads them to pass up a strong job applicant from what is arguably the nation's most elite law school. Second, even if law firm hiring committees did believe the comments, it seems unlikely that very many of them would reject the student's application for that reason. Most big law firms care very little about associates' personal lives outside the office, so long as those associates are racking up the billable hours. Even if one or two firms were deterred from making offers to this student by the internet comments, it is highly unlikely that all sixteen (or even a large percentage of them) were.
This is not to deny the fact that anonymous comments on the internet may cause great offense and hurt feelings, including in this case. But I doubt they play as big a role in the job market as some have suggested.
However, since you are a Yale Law graduate, I am suprised that you think Yale is only "arguably" the most elite law school. =)
I was trying to be polite to our inferior rivals:).
Regardless of whether this particular case cost somebody a job, I'm sure you would find it a bit disturbing if you were alerted to the fact that a Google search for your name returned anonymous posts claiming to have knowledge of your sexual history, false assertions about your LSAT score, threats to violate you sexually, and claims of your STD status.
Maybe that's more than you were looking to bite off with this post, but it seems relevant.
Well that's easily fixed -- Ilya Somin is a deviated prevert who performs unnatural acts with raw haddock and mayonaise.
The article quoted two students--a 1L and a 2L. The 2L is the one who didn't get a job.
Thanks her attempts to eliminate the message board thread discussing her, the YLS 2L has been widely identified online and at her school. She was better off before the folks at ReputationDefender.com became involved. This seems to be the case for their clients; witness the Ronnie Segev debacle and the Christine Parascandola incident.
Having said that, a wise employer should know the difference between what an applicant herself wrote, whether it was on the internet or not, and what was written about her. The first you have control over, the second you don't.
Of course, if the school newspaper had written about her that she threw fire bombs on the college campus, that would hurt her too.
So the bottom line is that the employer, when googling a person, has to give appropriate weight to all these different comments.
Back when I was involved in other issues of personnel management (and a smattering of hiring issues), we considered "S" curves for various personnel groupings. These curves represented the amount of investment necessary for staff over time and, in part identified points of company average profitability.
There is a very large investment over a considerable time span for most groupings in my field of engineering. When I did deal with the hiring side of things, potential longevity with the company was definitely considered. Sometimes it was a subject, decidedly opaque, during the interview process.
On the flip side, when we had layoffs during slow periods, and tough choices had to be made, folks who had a tendency during idle chatting to talk about moving on, often got that opportunity over others who talked of moving up the ladder.
But here is another possibility that relates the "S" curve we used. I don't know about the hiring process in your field, but if your experience is accurate regarding an applicant's qualifications, such as this lady's, tending towards a career in academia, then her analysis appears to be amateurish. I expect good analytical skills are important in the legal profession, so, if a) I was involved in the legal hiring field, 2) it was necessary for me to consider hiring her, and c) I had any indication her analytical skills were at that level, then I would being seeing a rather elongated "S" curve and that would be strike against her.
Is there a strike three?
And I can't imagine that posts describing a female candidate as very attractive (however crudely) would deter male lawyers from hiring her. You'd think that would be neutral at best, or maybe a positive factor. As for whether that works in reverse for a good looking candidate plus female lawyers, that's a tougher call.
I thought I read, a couple of years ago, a post by EV suggesting that the AutoAdmit administrator, who was a Penn 1L at the time, would have his participation in some of the uglier pseudo-stalking incidents reported to the Character and Fitness Committee. Does anyone know if that ever happened, or was actually warranted?
I'm agnostic about whether any of the three women described in the Washington Post story were discriminated against at work (or at school) because of the vicious sexualized gossip about them at AutoAdmit.
What happened to the women with 0 offers is unusual enough to merit further consideration. Even the WaPo stresses that it's impossible to prove a definitive link.
It's hard to get a sense of the scale of the abuse unless you Google the person's real name and see what's out there. I learned the real names of two of the women mentioned in the WaPo article. A troll showed up on my blog and posted them gratuitously. I deleted it, of course. One of my Yale Law readers confirmed the names of the two women in question in a private email.
If you Google one woman's name the very first hit is a screaming headline:"[Student's Full Name] HAS HUGE FAKE TITS..." the link takes you to the first post in a thread heaping abuse on this woman. It's not just sexual or appearance-based criticism. The first poster claims that this woman is emotionally unstable and "the most hated person at Yale Law." That post is followed by numerous posts, many ostensibly from her classmates, echoing these sentiments and throwing their own accusations.
Most of the first page of Google results are links to one or another AutoAdmit hatefests. This is a very accomplished person who generates a large absolute number of hits about her awards, student activities, and other accomplishments. But you have to pick through a huge volume of character assassination just in the titles of the links in order to find the positive stuff.
I'd be shocked if this level of character assassination didn't eventually affect the woman's academic prospects. It might not be a make or break thing for a job at a law firm, but the cumulative effects of having everyone who Googles your name see "[Your Name] Has Huge Fake Tits" are not going to be good.
Now, I will probably never get work again...
A person who claimed to know her from Stanford said that she was a stupid bitch (her 159 LSAT score was the criteria for "stupid bitch" that they used) and to watch out for her. The rest of the comments are sheer speculation by people that weren't even at her school and men just commenting on her looks. There is NOTHING in that thread that should be taken seriously by ANY employer. It's not as though people were writing "Oh, I go to law school with this girl and she lies, cheats, and steals" or "This girl had sex with my boyfriend and gave him herpes". It's more along the lines of an elementary school playground name-calling session. Several of the posters stick up for her and even insult those that are giving her a hard time.
So please... before people jump to conclusions on this one READ THE DAMN THREAD.
And just as a side point- if this girl is so willing to blame ONE THREAD on ONE WEBSITE for her failure to land a job (coming out of Yale, no less), I'd be willing to bet that her rancid personality had something to do with her lack of job offers. Just a thought.
- Prospective employers have referenced the defamation in question
- Past employers and internship employers mentioned the defamation in question, and even made harassing remarks about it
- Other students mentioned the defamation in question and made harassing and threatening remarks based on the defamation in question
- Professors mentioned the defamation in question and made harassing remarks based on the defamation in question (Other students were amazed at the grade the student received from one of these professors because it was at such odds with the class participation of the student. And participation was a big part of this course's grade.)
- Other students, including student employees of the university computer system, clearly had access to the defamatory material and were propagating it.
- Other students had electronic access to images of the student that required the commission of felonies to generate and obtain that were used in the defamation.
- A bar preparation lecturer and former bar exam grader and bar association official also made references to the defamation.
- Etc, etc, etc....
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think the defamation has effected this person's career.
And note that one technique of smear campaigns like this is to play games with cause and effect. Certain parties will harass someone using defamatory material, lies, threats, etc. and then when the person justifiably responds with outrage and anger the same parties will claim the person is boorish, obnoxious, arrogant, oversensitive, impolite, unstable, dangerous, takes themselves too seriously, is trying to extort money, etc. They will particularly use claims that the person is unstable or dangerous and claim they are afraid of the person if the person is male. (Even though the harassment they initiated clearly shows they aren't afraid of the person.)
I don't know when Prof. Somin graduated Yale, but as a pretty recent vet of the hiring process (and current beneficiary of the drastic shortage of midlevel associates) I find it really, really shocking that a Yale grad could meet such results. The Cravaths and the Sullivans of the world might have objections to such a credentialed applicant, but it's an almost-open secret that a large number of firms are almost guaranteed offers for top-end law students. Students in the top quarter at Columbia/NYU and maybe top half at Harvard, at least my year, were kind of just waved through so long as they didn't have a crippling personality defect (and even then, odds were that at least one of those firms would miss the clues).
It's of course to be conceded that we can't know for sure what reason this particular student didn't get an offer. But just as a matter of numbers, it's pretty remarkable. The extent to which that gives rise to an inference that this message board might have played a role in the hiring process is pretty slight, but it sure seems suspicious.
I admire the way the folks at Volokh respond to criticism, some of it harsh, with an aplomb that makes such attacks irrelevant and would show themselves to be a valuable addition to any law firm.
Heh, did you seriously compare the XOXO criticism of the posters to the criticism that the law profs receive here?
I mean c'mon, the shit that flies at XOXO would be deleted here in a milisecond, the IP's would be blocked, and a couple of profs would be dialing numbers to get subpoenas.
I wouldn't worry too much about someone who cannot spell "mayonnaise" ruining your reputation.
On a more serious note, I am not sure I would WANT to work for an employer who was relying on anonymous or semi-anonymous web postings in making its hiring decisions.
2. Moreover, I would argue that even if there were some scuttlebutt about someone out there, and interviewers knew it before speaking to the applicant, the situation could very well work to the applicant's advantage if he/she came off as a perfectly normal person during the interview. I add that at many top schools, there's no application process to getting an interview -- you just sign up for them. So anyone can get interviews with a firm, allowing one the opportunity to rebut whatever impressions might have initially been formed.
3. I know some other law students who were the subjects of embarrassing internet phenomena -- in fact, due to their own fault, not even just anonymous chatter. And they did just fine in the job process (very well, in fact), because they handled it professionally by not wallowing in it, explaining themselves, and allowing the interviewer/firm to recognize that this was not something that should affect their potential contributions to the firm. Who knows if that's how this Yale 2L approached the situation, but, like Prof. Somin and others commenting here, I am very skeptical that the anonymous chatter adversely affected her professional opportunities.
I still hold that my statement is both a valid and solid recommendation apropos American Psikhushka's comment I cited. Do I really need to make comparisons or give examples?
It seems especially unlikely to be true given that only two people in the class at Yale have scores below 160 (based on their publicly-available data).
The fact that others are now citing her LSAT score ON THIS VERY BOARD as gospel truth suggests that there is harm done by the anonymous posting of libelous data.
How could she respond? Post her actual score? The social norms of law school prevent people from sharing GPA and LSAT data. She sould be viewed as self-aggrandizing if she just sent an email to all her classmates informing them of her actual score out of the blue. Posting on AutoAdmit would just fan the flames of troll higher.
The trolls are even trying to smear her on this board, which is a little gross. They have made it their mission to personally destroy someone who dared to enforce her right to not be libelled.
Oh, and getting her LSAT wrong. Because, you know, that's not important or anything.
This happened to me in 1998, which was in the middle of the 1990s boom, and a good time for hiring. Despite that, DC firms were generally suspicious of people who seem like they're going to jump ship for academia quickly, and I suspect that the same attitude is prevalent today.
That was the infamous Brian Leiter threatening that. (Although he was coy enough to have couched it in the format of (rhetorical) questions rather than affirmative threats. E.g. "Do you think that will hurt him with Character &Fitness?" -- that sort of thing. That's a paraphrase, not a direct quote.))
I said that I have no idea whether any of the women mentioned in the article suffered any discrimination at work or school because of the threads on AutoAdmit. I'm just saying that if you google either of the two names I learned from my troll, you get a barrage of incredibly nasty stuff from AutoAdmit. Hiring partners may not care, but they're not the only possible audience. Clients might be upset. Non-legal academics are notoriously uptight about their potential hires' online paper trails. Maybe law professors are more humane and rational, but who knows?
In an era where everyone googles everyone else, it's hard to imagine that there won't be real-life repercussions. Law students are notoriously paranoid about anything that might reflect badly on them, or reduce their chances of landing that hyper-prestigious job. So, I think most people will understand why the targets of AutoAdmit shaming might be concerned.
I'm trying to correct the possible misapprehension these kinds of threads happened in a remote corner of the web that your average internet searcher will never see. Furthermore, especially since the WaPo article, AutoAdmit appears to have become a forum to plot against the anonymous women who dared to complain to the media.
I've read a lot of threads on AutoAdmit, and there's some really scary stuff on that board. You see comments like "We can't let that bitch have her own blog be the first hit on Google," you see people scheming to create deceptive Wikipedia entries about their targets. One recent thread, a top Google hit, bore the title, "[Real Name] Found Dead in Her Apartment!"
In one particularly horrifying thread a poster claims to have made a spreadsheet of the contact information of all the faculty at YLS and says he's going to email them a letter about the woman's father's alleged criminal history and her dispute with AutoAdmit.
I ask because you seem to label everything someone says about a person as "libel," which is not accurate. I can say JoeCurious is an idiot with big **** and while it might be dumb and inaccurate, it's not libel.
> the only bad thing said about her is that she's "dumb."
Oh, and getting her LSAT wrong. Because, you know, that's not important or anything.
Once you get into Yale and get decent grades (which she claimed she had), then no, it's not really relevant. Second, which firms do you think actually follow LSAT-score reports from anonymous internet users, especially when interviewing candidates at schools like Yale. Hint: probably none.
That is surprising, and not consistent with my own experience. Could be that I'm mistaken (could be that DC is a different from New York, too).
DC is indeed different from NYC, in large part because the summer associate classes at major DC firms are a lot smaller, but at least at YLS, just as much in demand by student applicants.
When I interviewed law students, I was told by the recruiting committees to look out for people who didn't seem interested in working for a law firm, and for people who didn't have an obvious explanation why they wanted to work in the city they were interviewing for. Someone coming from Stanford undergrad and Yale Law and interviewing in an East Coast city where she has no ties with too academic a resume is going to have some strikes against her before anyone googles them.
Amber, I, too, am puzzled at the reaction you got. I say this because I also listed target shooting as one of my hobbies on my resume. I never got a single negative reaction from an interviewer, and the rare person who commented on it usually expressed surprise and (positive) curiosity that a girl would be into guns. I interviewed primarily in California and DC, though, not NYC.
Jill Fillipovic of Feministe was also harassed on AA, but she wasn't mentioned the WaPo article. Jill didn't get burned for revealing anything more personal about herself than a vacation pic in a bathing suit--the sort of pic people enclose in their Christmas cards in the 21st Century. Hell, I know lawyers and executives who display similar pictures of themselves their offices! Since they're middle-aged men, nobody lectures them about it.
I read most of the AutoAdmit and xo content about the two women mentioned in the article, and very little of it referenced their self-published online content. These women had their pictures stolen off Facebook, or similar sites, but that's about it.
Contrary to what most people over 35 believe, a social networking presence isn't always an excuse to spill your most intimate secrets. When I first started blogging, people would act aghast and ask me why I wanted to blog about my sex life. I'd look at them equally aghast and demand to know why they were making such a ridiculous and degrading assumption. It turned out that as far as these people knew, blogs were all about sex and work gossip. Those were the only blogs they'd ever heard of through the mainstream media.
Now, people realize that there are blogs about every conceivable subject, from constitutional law to childcare to cooking. A year from now, the average person will understand that MySpace, Facebook, and Flickr aren't just big confessional orgies for kids.
These days, having a Facebook presence is an important form of social and professional networking for young people. If you don't have one, you'll miss out.
It's hopelessly anachronistic to say that you shouldn't even post your real name and picture online. If you haven't, your school, your work, your friends, or someone else probably already has.
Most of the people who are tut-tutting about how much young people reveal about themselves online have never even bothered to check what a simple Google search for their own name will reveal.
I agree with this. I have a half-formed thought about this, though. People with blogs or who otherwise have an internet presence seem to be more immune to these sorts of attacks than people who don't. I'm not sure why this is, but I find it interesting. Maybe it's because bloggers can respond to criticism that's out there, maybe it's because they have enough Google hits for other sites about them that they don't have to worry that some XO page is the only data point a potential employer has, or maybe it's just because bloggers have voluntarily sacrificed enough of their privacy that they feel less revulsion at the prospect of being "cyber-ogled" by a bunch of anonymous trolls.
OTOH, I had a prospective hire (trial court research attorney position) ask me whether my court would post her law &motion memos on the internet as the Court's Tentative Rulings, because the court she was leaving had done that without notifying her that it was doing so. She only learned of its practice when she was no longer greeted with glad cries of joy upon entering local legal watering holes. The civil attorneys did not appreciate the catty comments in her memos - "Joe will never, ever, understand the difference between resulting and constructive trusts", etc.
Without getting too specific, the facts are such that would make anyone respond with anger and outrage. Think death threats and pictures of doing sexual things to someone while they were unconscious. When that happens to the Volokh boys you can sprain your arm patting them on the back.
Pah, I can't believe law firms have such low self-esteem and tender sensibilities that they think sophomoric college articles can possibly injure or embarrass them. Will a group of bloodthirsty litigators really leap shrieking onto a chair, skirts held high, at the prospect that a current employee may have posted something dumb on the internet back in college?
You write "Think death threats and pictures of doing sexual things to someone while they were unconscious." Really. It seems to me those are criminal offenses depending on the circumstances, particularly the latter, as that shows a criminal offense being committed, unless it is a scene acted.
Is it reasonable to assume acting outraged and angered might get you nowhere and it might be better for the student to consult, I don't know, maybe a professor knowledgeable in this field, on how best to respond and to proceed accordingly? It might even help with references if the work was serious. It could also show that one's interest is outside academia if that impression was important.
The WaPo article notes, "The students' tales reflect the pitfalls of popular social-networking sites and highlight how social and technological changes lead to new clashes between free speech and privacy." I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know that all the legal avenues have been trod. Have they? Might new paths be blazed? Might the pursuit of legal means of redress not be thought of as a resume enhancement, if successful, or maybe even that they were attempted in an orderly and thoughtout way that shows the $200,000 one's invested in education to become a lawyer has borne an adequate fruit of reason and action to replace the contemporary fashion of emoting to a WaPo reporter about how terribly this is and, what, that a person so violated should hire a lawyer?
But I'll qualify that last remark. I've had one interaction with a reporter. The resulting report was cast, most decidedly ,IMHO, as running counter to what I expected, so maybe, in this case, my use of "emoting" is inaccurate. These three(?) might have conducted themselves in an impressive and professional manner for law students and the reporter makes it look like they are "outraged and angry" so the story is a better read. If so, I suppose they have been doubly wronged.
Anyway, thanks for your caution for me to not "sprain my arm". It was a nice touch. I haven't heard that in a long while. Attempting to devalue an opponent's arguments with such is a long tradition and I'm glad to see you are one who believes it still has a place. Maybe I should note I've never met any of the Volokh folks and live too far for me to do that, so people can regard it as a metaphor for your belief I might change my mind if one of the Volokh folks were to be in such a situation. To the contrary, I expect anyone one of them would blaze a trail to new law holding value that surpasses the work of any of the storied minds preceding them in annals of legal history. ;-)
You're welcome to your opinion, American Psikhushka. You might be right that it is sufficient to make anyone react that way. Without thinking.
The situation was ongoing and to an extent still is. And the threats directed at the person in question were felonies that tend to cancel out liability for any reactions.
You write "Think death threats and pictures of doing sexual things to someone while they were unconscious." Really. It seems to me those are criminal offenses depending on the circumstances, particularly the latter, as that shows a criminal offense being committed, unless it is a scene acted.
They weren't acted. And they certainly do constitute crimes.
Is it reasonable to assume acting outraged and angered might get you nowhere and it might be better for the student to consult, I don't know, maybe a professor knowledgeable in this field, on how best to respond and to proceed accordingly? It might even help with references if the work was serious. It could also show that one's interest is outside academia if that impression was important.
Evidence has been a big problem. Can't get too specific beyond that. Attorneys have been consulted, but it hasn't gotten very far. The things I mentioned are the tip of the iceberg - the situation gets much weirder.
The comment was meant to be more sarcastic than insulting. I'm glad you weren't too offended by it.