AutoAdmit
Encyclopedia
AutoAdmit, also known as Xoxohth, is a network of websites for prospective and current college, graduate, law students, and lawyer
s most notorious for its largely unmoderated message board. Its law school message board is now the only active section. The message board, which bills itself as "the most prestigious admissions board in the world," has drawn the attention and criticism of some in the legal community and the media, most notably the Wall Street Journal, and National Public Radio for its lack of moderation of offensive and defamatory content.
from scratch by Cohen and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology
student under the moniker "Boondocks" in order to emulate the old Allaire Forums software the Princeton Review message boards used. AutoAdmit's first users were dissatisfied with changes made to the Princeton Review message board in March 2004, such as stricter moderation
of discussions and the abandonment of the message board's popular tree format in favor of a vBulletin
-type format.
The website is the inspiration for a recent call for papers by the Yale Law Journal
on the topic of anonymous internet speech.
of the University of Texas at Austin
accused AutoAdmit of being "a massive forum for bizarre racist, anti-semitic, and viciously sexist postings, mixed in with posts genuinely related to law school" on his blog. This provoked the AutoAdmit administrators to suggest that Leiter had "proactively searched" for lewd content on the website.
U.S. Senator George Allen
used the term "macaca" to describe S.R. Sidarth, a 20-year old Jim Webb
campaign volunteer, conservative blog
ger Dan Riehl accused Sidarth of making racially insensitive and homophobic posts on the AutoAdmit message board,http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2006/08/allen_critic_sr.html including posts where Sidarth allegedly admitted to having sex with a transvestite while high on methamphetamine
.http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2006/08/update_on_sr_si.html. Although several blog commenters informed Riehl that the S.R. Sidarth poster on AutoAdmit was an impersonator
, and while Sidarth himself denied ever posting on AutoAdmit, Riehl refused to retract his story, arguing that Sidarth's denial "cannot be verified without an IP check, which I imagine would violate privacy restrictions." http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2006/08/allen_critic_sr.html
On August 28, 2006, after the owner of the S.R. Sidarth moniker on AutoAdmit changed his moniker and explained to Riehl that he was not actually S.R. Sidarth, Riehl threatened AutoAdmit's administrators with a lawsuit and alluded to pursuing felony criminal charges against the site.http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2006/08/could_s_r_sidar.html These threats were mocked by AutoAdmit users,http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=480029&mc=114&forum_id=2 and inspired a parody
thread where users documented testimony from the fictitious Riehl v. Xoxohth trial.http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=480092&mc=58&forum_id=2 As of June 28, 2008, no actual civil lawsuit or criminal proceedings have been initiated.
s at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy
, a large New York law firm, posed as Milbank attorneys on AutoAdmit and posted a fictitious Milbank internal memorandum announcing year-end bonus compensation amounts for the firm's attorneys. http://www.xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=535893&mc=158&forum_id=2 The hoax was staged a few hours after a Wall Street Journal article reported on the mounting speculation over law firm bonus amounts for that year. Because the fake internal memo announced bonuses that would have made total compensation only slightly higher than the past year, the post immediately evoked a sharp response from associates at other law firms who had expected a higher raise and feared their firms would match Milbank's announcement. The pranksters soon confessed to the elaborate hoax, prompting legal blogger David Lat
to give them "credit for decent execution" for sparking the frenzied discussion.
profiled two Yale Law School
students, who alleged that harassing and defamatory comments had been posted about them on AutoAdmit. On March 7, 2007, the Washington Post published a front-page article featuring AutoAdmit that reported similar allegations and raised questions regarding freedom of speech and anonymity.
On 19 March 2007, a Wall Street Journal editorial titled "Trash Talk" by Elizabeth Wurtzel
criticized the AutoAdmit law message board as a forum of "mean-spirited" gossip.http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009805
The sudden publicity sparked a flurry of debate as well as a new wave of harassment and threats against the Yale Law School students, including an incident that led Anthony Ciolli, a third year law student at the University of Pennsylvania
and one of AutoAdmit's administrators, to resign. The law firm Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge
revoked an offer of employment to Ciolli; Charles DeWitt, managing partner at the firm's Boston office, explained to Ciolli via private correspondence, "We expect any lawyer affiliated with our firm, when presented with the kind of language exhibited on the message board, to reject it and to disavow any affiliation with it. You, instead, facilitated the expression and publication of such language."
Deans from Yale Law School
and the University of Pennsylvania Law School
condemned the misogynistic and defamatory postings on AutoAdmit. Others have noted that this behavior is so unethical as to jeopardize one's prospects for bar admission and employment. Brad Wendel, a legal ethics
professor at Cornell Law School
, wrote, "If I were one of the students who made some of the worst of these comments, I'd be sweating bullets right now."
On June 12, 2007, the two Yale students who were allegedly harassed filed a lawsuit against Anthony Ciolli and a number of Autoadmit's anonymous posters, claiming their "character, intelligence, appearance and sexual lives have been thoroughly trashed by the defendants"http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2007/06/the_autoadmit_l.html. Filed in the District Court of Connecticut, the case, Doe v. Ciolli, 307CV00909 CFD, cites violation of privacy, defamation, infliction of undue emotional distress, and copyright infringement against Ciolli and several anonymous posters. The two plaintiffs are represented pro bono by the litigation boutique Keker & Van Nest, David Rosen, a Yale Law School professor, and Mark Lemley
, a professor at Stanford Law School who specializes in computer and internet law. While AutoAdmit's reported lack of IP logging may prevent the plaintiffs from ever learning the defendants' true identities, the case could prove to be very significant within computer and internet law if it does make it to trial. The plaintiffs subsequently dropped Ciolli's name from the list of defendants, and successfully obtained Doe subpoena
s of Internet service providers in hopes of identifying the anonymous defendants. The attorneys have now discovered the names of some, but not all, of the offending posters.
In March 2008, Anthony Ciolli filed his own suit against Heide Iravani, Brittan Heller, Ross Chanin, Reputation Defender, the law firm of Keker & Van Nest, as well as lawyer David Rosen and law professor Mark Lemley. Yale Daily News Article and Complaint in Ciolli v. Iravani et al. Amongst other claims, Ciolli alleges slander, libel, and abuse of process
, due to extensions of service. In March 2009, the court dismissed Brittan Heller from the suit because Ciolli never served her.
, an individual under the moniker "Trustafarian", a first-year law student at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, posted the following message in an AutoAdmit thread titled Just decided not to do a murder-suicide copycat at Hastings Law:
The posting was later edited by the poster to read "wgwag," (as it currently reads now) which stands for "White Girls With Asian Guys," in an attempt to make it appear as if the original posting were intended as a joke.
Hastings College of Law, acting on the advice of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
,http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/18/BAGT4PB3H66.DTL cancelled classes and evacuated the building at 3:22PM.http://memoirsofhastings.blogspot.com/2007/04/virginia-tech-copycat-threat-shutsdown.html
At 10:14PM, Jarret Cohen, President of AutoAdmit, issued a statement providing further factual information:
On April 25, 2007, UC Berkeley's School of Law recommended the poster be expelled for posting this threat.http://memoirsofhastings.blogspot.com/2007/04/update-boalt-dean-recommends-exlusion.html
Lawyer
A lawyer, according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person who is practicing law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain the stability of political...
s most notorious for its largely unmoderated message board. Its law school message board is now the only active section. The message board, which bills itself as "the most prestigious admissions board in the world," has drawn the attention and criticism of some in the legal community and the media, most notably the Wall Street Journal, and National Public Radio for its lack of moderation of offensive and defamatory content.
History
AutoAdmit, originally named Xoxohth, was founded in early 2004 by Jarret "rachmiel" Cohen. It was programmed in PHPPHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
from scratch by Cohen and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
student under the moniker "Boondocks" in order to emulate the old Allaire Forums software the Princeton Review message boards used. AutoAdmit's first users were dissatisfied with changes made to the Princeton Review message board in March 2004, such as stricter moderation
Moderation
Moderation is the process of eliminating or lessening extremes. It is used to ensure normality throughout the medium on which it is being conducted...
of discussions and the abandonment of the message board's popular tree format in favor of a vBulletin
VBulletin
vBulletin is a proprietary Internet forum software produced by Jelsoft Enterprises and vBulletin Solutions, both subsidiaries of Internet Brands. It is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database server.-History:...
-type format.
The website is the inspiration for a recent call for papers by the Yale Law Journal
Yale Law Journal
The Yale Law Journal is a student-run law review affiliated with the Yale Law School. Published continuously since 1891, it is the most widely known of the eight law reviews published by students at Yale Law School...
on the topic of anonymous internet speech.
Structure
The AutoAdmit internet forum is the centerpiece of the website. It features two modes: "School-related" and "School-related + Off-topic." While the default mode is "School-related" and is intended to contain posts dealing strictly with school and job-related topics, it is the more active "Off-topic" mode which has been the main subject of controversy.Trolling
On March 11, 2005 Brian LeiterBrian Leiter
Brian Leiter is an American philosopher and legal scholar who is currently John Wilson Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, and founder and Director of Chicago's new Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values and the editor of the Philosophical Gourmet Report. He taught from...
of the University of Texas at Austin
University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin is a state research university located in Austin, Texas, USA, and is the flagship institution of the The University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, its campus is located approximately from the Texas State Capitol in Austin...
accused AutoAdmit of being "a massive forum for bizarre racist, anti-semitic, and viciously sexist postings, mixed in with posts genuinely related to law school" on his blog. This provoked the AutoAdmit administrators to suggest that Leiter had "proactively searched" for lewd content on the website.
S.R. Sidarth impersonator
On August 25, 2006, two weeks after RepublicanRepublican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
U.S. Senator George Allen
George Allen (U.S. politician)
George Felix Allen is a former United States Senator from the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the son of former NFL head coach George Allen. Allen served Virginia in the state legislature, as the 67th Governor, and in both bodies of the U.S. Congress, winning election to the Senate in 2000...
used the term "macaca" to describe S.R. Sidarth, a 20-year old Jim Webb
Jim Webb
James Henry "Jim" Webb, Jr. is the senior United States Senator from Virginia. He is also an author and a former Secretary of the Navy. He is a member of the Democratic Party....
campaign volunteer, conservative blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
ger Dan Riehl accused Sidarth of making racially insensitive and homophobic posts on the AutoAdmit message board,http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2006/08/allen_critic_sr.html including posts where Sidarth allegedly admitted to having sex with a transvestite while high on methamphetamine
Methamphetamine
Methamphetamine is a psychostimulant of the phenethylamine and amphetamine class of psychoactive drugs...
.http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2006/08/update_on_sr_si.html. Although several blog commenters informed Riehl that the S.R. Sidarth poster on AutoAdmit was an impersonator
Impersonator
An impersonator is someone who imitates or copies the behavior or actions of another. There are many reasons for someone to be an impersonator, some common ones being as follows:...
, and while Sidarth himself denied ever posting on AutoAdmit, Riehl refused to retract his story, arguing that Sidarth's denial "cannot be verified without an IP check, which I imagine would violate privacy restrictions." http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2006/08/allen_critic_sr.html
On August 28, 2006, after the owner of the S.R. Sidarth moniker on AutoAdmit changed his moniker and explained to Riehl that he was not actually S.R. Sidarth, Riehl threatened AutoAdmit's administrators with a lawsuit and alluded to pursuing felony criminal charges against the site.http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2006/08/could_s_r_sidar.html These threats were mocked by AutoAdmit users,http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=480029&mc=114&forum_id=2 and inspired a parody
Parody
A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...
thread where users documented testimony from the fictitious Riehl v. Xoxohth trial.http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=480092&mc=58&forum_id=2 As of June 28, 2008, no actual civil lawsuit or criminal proceedings have been initiated.
Fake Milbank memo
On November 29, 2006, a group of paralegalParalegal
Paralegal is used in most jurisdictions to describe a paraprofessional who assists qualified lawyers in their legal work. This is true in the United States and many other countries. However, in Ontario, Canada, paralegals are licensed by the Law Society of Upper Canada, giving paralegals an...
s at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy
Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy
Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP is a United States law firm headquartered in New York City. It also has offices in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, London, Frankfurt, Munich, Tokyo, Hong Kong, São Paulo, Singapore and Beijing.Milbank is a global law firm, with approximately 550 lawyers who...
, a large New York law firm, posed as Milbank attorneys on AutoAdmit and posted a fictitious Milbank internal memorandum announcing year-end bonus compensation amounts for the firm's attorneys. http://www.xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=535893&mc=158&forum_id=2 The hoax was staged a few hours after a Wall Street Journal article reported on the mounting speculation over law firm bonus amounts for that year. Because the fake internal memo announced bonuses that would have made total compensation only slightly higher than the past year, the post immediately evoked a sharp response from associates at other law firms who had expected a higher raise and feared their firms would match Milbank's announcement. The pranksters soon confessed to the elaborate hoax, prompting legal blogger David Lat
David Lat
David B. Lat is an American blogger and a former federal prosecutor. He is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law, a blog about law firms and the legal profession....
to give them "credit for decent execution" for sparking the frenzied discussion.
Anonymous speech and harassment
On March 1, 2007, ABC NewsABC News
ABC News is the news gathering and broadcasting division of American broadcast television network ABC, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company...
profiled two Yale Law School
Yale Law School
Yale Law School, or YLS, is the law school of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Established in 1824, it offers the J.D., LL.M., J.S.D. and M.S.L. degrees in law. It also hosts visiting scholars, visiting researchers and a number of legal research centers...
students, who alleged that harassing and defamatory comments had been posted about them on AutoAdmit. On March 7, 2007, the Washington Post published a front-page article featuring AutoAdmit that reported similar allegations and raised questions regarding freedom of speech and anonymity.
On 19 March 2007, a Wall Street Journal editorial titled "Trash Talk" by Elizabeth Wurtzel
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel is an American corporate attorney, writer and journalist, known for her work in the confessional memoir genre. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School.-Early life:...
criticized the AutoAdmit law message board as a forum of "mean-spirited" gossip.http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009805
The sudden publicity sparked a flurry of debate as well as a new wave of harassment and threats against the Yale Law School students, including an incident that led Anthony Ciolli, a third year law student at the University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
and one of AutoAdmit's administrators, to resign. The law firm Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge
Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge
Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge LLP is an AmLaw 100 law firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. The firm was formed by the 2005 merger of Edwards & Angell LLP and Palmer & Dodge LLP...
revoked an offer of employment to Ciolli; Charles DeWitt, managing partner at the firm's Boston office, explained to Ciolli via private correspondence, "We expect any lawyer affiliated with our firm, when presented with the kind of language exhibited on the message board, to reject it and to disavow any affiliation with it. You, instead, facilitated the expression and publication of such language."
Deans from Yale Law School
Yale Law School
Yale Law School, or YLS, is the law school of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Established in 1824, it offers the J.D., LL.M., J.S.D. and M.S.L. degrees in law. It also hosts visiting scholars, visiting researchers and a number of legal research centers...
and the University of Pennsylvania Law School
University of Pennsylvania Law School
The University of Pennsylvania Law School, located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is the law school of the University of Pennsylvania. A member of the Ivy League, it is among the oldest and most selective law schools in the nation. It is currently ranked 7th overall by U.S. News & World Report,...
condemned the misogynistic and defamatory postings on AutoAdmit. Others have noted that this behavior is so unethical as to jeopardize one's prospects for bar admission and employment. Brad Wendel, a legal ethics
Legal ethics
Legal ethics encompasses an ethical code governing the conduct of persons engaged in the practice of law and persons more generally in the legal sector.-In the United States:...
professor at Cornell Law School
Cornell Law School
Cornell Law School, located in Ithaca, New York, is a graduate school of Cornell University and one of the five Ivy League law schools. The school confers three law degrees...
, wrote, "If I were one of the students who made some of the worst of these comments, I'd be sweating bullets right now."
On June 12, 2007, the two Yale students who were allegedly harassed filed a lawsuit against Anthony Ciolli and a number of Autoadmit's anonymous posters, claiming their "character, intelligence, appearance and sexual lives have been thoroughly trashed by the defendants"http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2007/06/the_autoadmit_l.html. Filed in the District Court of Connecticut, the case, Doe v. Ciolli, 307CV00909 CFD, cites violation of privacy, defamation, infliction of undue emotional distress, and copyright infringement against Ciolli and several anonymous posters. The two plaintiffs are represented pro bono by the litigation boutique Keker & Van Nest, David Rosen, a Yale Law School professor, and Mark Lemley
Mark Lemley
Mark A. Lemley is the director of the Stanford University program in Law, Science & Technology. He teaches intellectual property, computer and Internet patent and antitrust law. He is a widely cited expert on the impact of patents on innovation and what the appropriate requirements for granting...
, a professor at Stanford Law School who specializes in computer and internet law. While AutoAdmit's reported lack of IP logging may prevent the plaintiffs from ever learning the defendants' true identities, the case could prove to be very significant within computer and internet law if it does make it to trial. The plaintiffs subsequently dropped Ciolli's name from the list of defendants, and successfully obtained Doe subpoena
Doe subpoena
A Doe subpoena is a subpoena that seeks the identity of an unknown defendant to a lawsuit. Most jurisdictions permit a plaintiff who does not yet know a defendant's identity to file suit against John Doe and then use the tools of the discovery process to seek the defendant's true name...
s of Internet service providers in hopes of identifying the anonymous defendants. The attorneys have now discovered the names of some, but not all, of the offending posters.
In March 2008, Anthony Ciolli filed his own suit against Heide Iravani, Brittan Heller, Ross Chanin, Reputation Defender, the law firm of Keker & Van Nest, as well as lawyer David Rosen and law professor Mark Lemley. Yale Daily News Article and Complaint in Ciolli v. Iravani et al. Amongst other claims, Ciolli alleges slander, libel, and abuse of process
Abuse of process
Abuse of process is a cause of action in tort arising from one party making a malicious and deliberate misuse or perversion of regularly issued court process not justified by the underlying legal action.It is a common law intentional tort...
, due to extensions of service. In March 2009, the court dismissed Brittan Heller from the suit because Ciolli never served her.
U.C. Hastings evacuation
On April 18, 2007, two days after the Virginia Tech massacreVirginia Tech massacre
The Virginia Tech massacre was a school shooting that took place on April 16, 2007, on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. In two separate attacks, approximately two hours apart, the perpetrator, Seung-Hui Cho, killed 32 people...
, an individual under the moniker "Trustafarian", a first-year law student at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, posted the following message in an AutoAdmit thread titled Just decided not to do a murder-suicide copycat at Hastings Law:
Date: April 18th, 2007 1:35 PM
Author: Trustafarian
I went to bed all set for "Bloody Wednesday," but when I woke -- to sun, to flowers in bloom -- I just couldn't bring myself to suit up.
Maybe tomorrow; I hear rain's in the forecast."
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=616215&forum_id=2#7956138)
The posting was later edited by the poster to read "wgwag," (as it currently reads now) which stands for "White Girls With Asian Guys," in an attempt to make it appear as if the original posting were intended as a joke.
Hastings College of Law, acting on the advice of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
,http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/18/BAGT4PB3H66.DTL cancelled classes and evacuated the building at 3:22PM.http://memoirsofhastings.blogspot.com/2007/04/virginia-tech-copycat-threat-shutsdown.html
At 10:14PM, Jarret Cohen, President of AutoAdmit, issued a statement providing further factual information:
This afternoon, the dean of the University of California, Hastings College of Law, acting on the advice of the FBI, cancelled classes and evacuated the building after becoming aware of a message posted on the AutoAdmit discussion board. An individual has come forward to claim responsibility for that message, and when the FBI special agent in charge of this matter contacted me I put him in touch with this person. My expectation is that this matter will, from this point on, be handled between the poster, the authorities, and the school.http://www.autoadmit.com/uc-hastings-evacuation.html
On April 25, 2007, UC Berkeley's School of Law recommended the poster be expelled for posting this threat.http://memoirsofhastings.blogspot.com/2007/04/update-boalt-dean-recommends-exlusion.html