You may recall that a couple of Yale Law School students sued the administrator of a law-school bulletin board because they blamed silly gossip about them on the board for costing them job offers. (The administrator himself lost his job offer in response to the uproar.) If so, how come their Yale Law classmate Elizabeth Wurtzel—whose topless photos decorate the Internet, who wrote about her own cocaine and Ritalin addictions, and who was fired from a newspaper for plagiarism—was able to get a job offer from WilmerHale? More on Wurtzel: Taylor; Lat; Bonin, all talking about this NY Times piece. Previous skepticism about the lawsuit: Ilya Somin.
What Elizabeth Wurtzel tells us about the XOXOHTH lawsuit
You may recall that a couple of Yale Law School students sued the administrator of a law-school bulletin board because they blamed silly gossip about them on the board for costing them job offers. (The administrator himself lost his job offer in response to the uproar.) If so, how come their Yale Law classmate Elizabeth […]
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Ted Frank said: If so, how come their Yale Law classmate Elizabeth Wurtzel—whose topless photos decorate the Internet, who wrote about her own cocaine and Ritalin addictions, and who was fired from a newspaper for plagiarism—was able to get a job offer from WilmerHale?
Also, Wurtzel does note that one of the questions she faced was ‘How can we overcome everything we know about you and come to hire you?’
“She has herpes” is silly gossip? That comment is libel per se by the writer (albeit probably not the administrator of the board) as to the Autoadmit plaintiff, but presumably statutory damages aren’t much.
I’m sure that the plaintiffs from Yale law school will be just fine on the market now that every liberal professor is falling all over themselves trying to help them out. It wasn’t right for their names to be dragged through the mud, but to say that “redibility has been blown to smithereens” is to overstate the case (which, I suppose, is what lawyers do all the time).