A comment in the Brian Leiter/anonymity thread referred to “Brian Leiter contacting Eugene Volokh as an ‘anonymous law prof’ to attack a law student who outdid his law school rankings.”
This turns out to be not entirely accurate. Prof. Leiter e-mailed me and asked me to post a comment pointing out the inaccuracy, but I thought it was worth noting as a separate post.
The original e-mail from Prof. Leiter to me, which I quoted and attributed to “another lawprof,” was not strictly speaking anonymous: He certainly signed the message to me. The message pointed out various posts at xoxohth, and argued that the operators of the site deserved to be blamed for not removing those posts. It then said that if I wanted to publicly shame the xoxohth operator — a decision on which Prof. Leiter expressed some ambivalence, since he wasn’t sure whether it was better to shame the operator, or to avoid calling more attention to what Prof. Leiter thought was a bad site — I shouldn’t refer to Prof. Leiter in the process.
I found myself disagreeing with Prof. Leiter’s criticism of the xoxohth operator, sent Prof. Leiter my explanation, invited him to go public with his criticisms, so that his and my views would provide an interesting contrast, but said that “[i]f you prefer, I could post your message with my response, and just label you as an anonymous lawprof.” He agreed to that latter approach, and that led to the post that I link to in the preceding paragraph.
So Prof. Leiter did not precisely contact me “as an ‘anonymous law prof’ to attack a law student . . . .” Rather, he contacted me nonanonymously (or onymously, reader BillB points out) with a criticism of the law student, and suggested that if I did criticize the student, I should do so without referring to him (Prof. Leiter).
UPDATE: Prof. Leiter points out that, at the time he e-mailed me, he didn’t yet know the site was run by a law student. I’m not sure how much of a difference this makes, but I’m happy to note it for the record.
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