There will always be debate about limits on free speech but I would think it is only extreme libertarians who would seriously argue that defamation (untrue derogatory statement about an individual) should be protected as free speech.
It is my view that the truth of a statement should always be an adequate defence against any attack on it but the converse of that is that untrue statements may deserve punishment if they are harmful.
This is all brought to the fore by the case of AutoAdmit -- a discussion board for law students -- primarily ones at Ivy League law scools, it seems. Many statements appearing on the site about particular individuals are highly defamatory (i.e. derogatory and untrue) and have caused great harm to the careers of some female law students particularly.
As I noted on March 21, however, it has in some unfathomable way been held that nothing on the site can be sanctioned in any way because of the free speech protections of the First Amendment.
That sounds to me like nothing so much as lawyers and law students looking after one-another but it seems that there has at last been at least one exception to that. One of the people running the site has lost his job over it. We read:
"In May, Wall Street Journal Law Blog writer Amir Efrati reported that the other AutoAdmit principal had been refused continued employment at a prestigious law firm. The attorney who refused further employment wrote, “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… [and your resignation from the site was] too late to ameliorate our concerns.”
Source
Bravo!
