As an editor of Above the Law, I find the headline below amusing. As a commenter on Above the Law, some of you will find the headline terrifying. From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

A single vulgar word cost a man his job on Friday.

Well, that’s putting way too nice of a spin on it. It’s not like somebody put in a vulgar comment and then the secret police crashed his cubicle and then kicked him out on the street.

No, the blogger who noticed and deleted the vulgar comment called the commenter’s employer:

A few minutes later, the same guy posted the same single-word comment again. I deleted it, but noticed in the WordPress e-mail alert that his comment had come from an IP address at a local school. So I called the school. They were happy to have me forward the e-mail, though I wasn’t sure what they’d be able to do with the meager information it included.

Armed with the IP address, the IT people at the school quickly found out who posted the comment. The commenter was confronted and resigned.

Would I ever do something like that? No. Because I’m drunk with alcohol, not power.

Let me explain after the jump.

Yesterday’s Lawsuit of the Day — Jones v. Minkin, a $44 million lawsuit against yours truly, Above the Law publisher David Minkin, and Dead Horse Media (now known as Breaking Media) — has been voluntarily dismissed by the plaintiff, University of Miami law professor Donald Jones.

Pursuant to Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i)(B), the dismissal is without prejudice. If Professor Jones wants to refile, he should note the statute of limitations (which had already run as to most of our posts about him by the time his complaint was filed).

There was NO SETTLEMENT in this case. Above the Law has made no changes to our prior posts, and we have paid no money to Professor Jones. The case was dismissed by the plaintiff without anything from our side, except a letter from our lawyer.

UPDATE (3:35 PM): We have offered Professor Jones a guest post on Above the Law in which to provide his side of the story, about either the lawsuit or the underlying facts. We have offered to keep the comments on that post closed or open, depending on his preference. (And we would have done this in the first place, had he made such a request.)

A huge thanks to our counsel, Marc Randazza.

Comment from Randazza, plus links to the notice of voluntary dismissal and other news outlets and blogs — we will UPDATE continually, so do check back for fresh links — after the jump.

For the first time in over three years of operation, Above the Law has been sued. We feel the lawsuit has no merit, but we will not comment further on this ongoing litigation. To access the pro se complaint, coverage by other news outlets and blogs, and ATL’s prior posts about Professor Donald Jones, click on the links collected after the jump.

Please note that we have closed comments on this post, out of respect for the judicial process. Thank you.

UPDATE: We will be continually updating this post with links to news and blogosphere coverage. We have already added new links from the ABA Journal, the WSJ Law Blog, and the Volokh Conspiracy, among other sources.

The fresh links will appear AFTER THE JUMP, so check them out there. Thanks.

Law firm mass emails can be a bitter pill to swallow. Nobody wants to be publicly accused of, say, taking craps on the bathroom floor. In that instance, a simple multiple-choice survey on bathroom habits followed by a marksmanship competition would have sufficed. One legal administrator recently learned the hard way that sending inflammatory mass emails is rarely the route to popularity or success. Or is it?

Jordan Reid (née Berkow) is your typical NYC born and bred jerkhat. She went to Dalton private school and then moved on to Harvard, where she got her undergrad degree in cognitive neuroscience. (Ed. note: that’s in the psychology department, nice try.)

Perhaps prompted by her voice coach and by a successful run in a summer camp production of “The Pajama Game,” Jordan went to L.A. to seek fame and fortune. After a few small roles and the requisite appearance on Law & Order, she abandoned ship and returned to NYC, where her she lived in an apartment partially paid for by her parents. As a matter of course, her mom, who worked in a law firm, hooked her up with a job as a legal administrator there. It’s not clear exactly where she worked, but Jordan describes the firm as “a fairly depressing” place, where she sobbed at her desk. If this sounds like your office, join the club email us at tips.

A flip-flop and an email, after the jump.

We’re getting mixed messages from the mainstream media. Just last week, Bloomberg told us Facebook and social networks are good for lawyers:

“Online networks are a fantastic tool for identifying expertise in the fields in which general counsel are looking to rein in outside counsel,” Eugene Weitz, an in-house attorney at Paris-based Alcatel Lucent, said in an interview. “Experts bubble up who have the ability to show their knowledge online.”

Some lawyers show a little too much online, though. That can get them into trouble. It can get them reprimanded by the bar, fined, or fired. This weekend, John Schwartz of the New York TImes did a nice round-up of lawyers’ Facebook fiascos.

Some “no-nos” when it comes to online behavior, after the jump.

Apologies for not getting to this story earlier. Sometimes things fall through the cracks around here. (We were offline for much of Thursday and Friday, attending Lavender Law.)

Last week, a federal magistrate judge questioned the propriety of the U.S. Attorney’s Office moving to dismiss a marijuana possession charge against Andrew Sullivan. Yes, that Andrew Sullivan — the noted political pundit, author, and blogger (and proponent of marijuana legalization).

Judge Collings issued his saucy opinion (PDF) on Thursday. Later that day, the story was broken by The Docket. The case has also been covered by Gawker, Wonkette, and the WSJ Law Blog, among other outlets (links collected below).

So we won’t rehash what you’ve probably already read. But feel free to take our reader poll and to discuss the case in the comments.

Judge angered by special treatment for Andrew Sullivan [The Docket / MLW]
United States v. Sullivan [PDF] [U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts]
Andrew Sullivan’s Federal Pot Favors [Gawker]
Friendly D.A. Saves Andrew Sullivan From Life Sentence In Gitmo, For Smoking Marijuana [Wonkette]
On Marijuana, a Famous Blogger, and One Skeptical Judge [WSJ Law Blog]

Happy Labor Day! Hopefully you are enjoying a well-deserved day off. But to those of you who are at work, or who aren’t at work but still checking Above the Law today, welcome to Off the Record — our look back on the week that was.

We mentioned the ‘Skanks in NYC’ case in yesterday’s Morning Docket, and I’ve written about it extensively over at True/Slant.

To summarize: a blogger started a website called ‘Skanks in NYC’ in order to say nasty things about model Liskula Cohen. Cohen discovered the site containing just five posts, in which the blogger called Cohen a skank, a ho, and an old hag, among other nasty things, and posted photos of her.

Cohen decided she wanted to file a defamation suit against the anonymous blogger, so her lawyer subpoenaed Google — which hosted ‘Skanks in NYC’ at Blogger — to obtain the writer’s e-mail and IP address. The blogger’s lawyer fought the subpoena but lost. Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Joan Madden ordered Google to turn over the information. Google sent it along. Cohen filed her defamation suit outing her alleged defamer: Rosemary Port, a 29-year-old Fashion Institute of Technology student who was mad at Cohen for saying nasty things about her to Port’s boyfriend.

The press wrote lots of stories about the case and about Port, whose name the media obtained from court papers. Cohen then dropped her $3 million defamation suit, making it appear that this may have been a Cyberslapp: “a new form of lawsuit… threatening to overturn the promise of anonymous online speech and chill the freedom of expression that is central to the online world.”

Now Port wants to slap Google with a $15 million lawsuit, saying Google violated her First Amendment rights by complying with the court order. Her lawyer went so far as to compare ‘Skanks in NYC’ with the Federalist Papers. From the New York Daily News:

“I’m ready to take this all the way to the Supreme Court,” [Port’s lawyer, Salvatore] Strazzullo said. “Our Founding Fathers wrote ‘The Federalist Papers’ under pseudonyms. Inherent in the First Amendment is the right to speak anonymously. Shouldn’t that right extend to the new public square of the Internet?”

It’s been widely reported, but what are the actual merits of the suit against Google? We spoke with renowned privacy expert and George Washington Law professor Daniel Solove about the case and have an answer for you after the jump. While we had him on the phone, we also discussed how one becomes the foremost U.S. expert on privacy by age 37.

But with a hot blonde model as the plaintiff. From our sister site, Fashionista:

Liskula Cohen’s modeled for Versace and Armani and landed international Vogue covers, but recently she’s made less fashionable headlines.

Last year, a doorman smashed her over the head with a vodka bottle, and this year she’s sued Google to reveal the identity of an especially cruel blogger. The both tragic and anonymous person used Google’s blogger.com platform to unleash constant rants about the blond’s imagined sexual habits, but argued in court that the words were “non-actionable opinion and/or hyperbole.”

Find out how this fared, at Fashionista.

Internet Anonymity at its Worst [Fashionista]

The inherent tension between the old media and the new media boiled over the weekend when Ian Shapira wrote an insightful article for the Washington Post about how Gawker appropriated one of his stories. For people concerned with the so-called “death of journalism,” it is a must read. It is a fairly accurate description of what happens when bloggers repackage stories.

Yesterday, Gawker fired back at the Washington Post. Gabriel Snyder explained how bloggers add original commentary, humor, and sometimes insight. It’s one of the reasons readers keep coming back.

Today, our own Kashmir Hill entered the fray. She points out that some blogs (ahem) actually report and break news, and that news is repackaged by mainstream media sources all the time, often without sufficient attribution or original insight. Over on True/Slant, Kash writes about what happened to her popular story about Fordham’s privacy dossier on Justice Scalia:

I’m a struggling blogger making very little money. I would have been happy to write that story for the New York Times on a freelance basis and get paid for it. (As Washingtonian Magazine invited me to do for its June issue.)

But that’s not how these things usually work. As journalists — the traditional ones and the “new” ones/bloggers — we get stories out into the world, and then they bounce around and gather steam and get read. It’s exciting!

I’m happy my story was covered, regurgitated and repackaged. It’s an important story about a topic -privacy- that I am passionate about.

Hear, hear. The old media simply doesn’t have a monopoly on original reporting anymore.

In case you are interested, Above the Law has a very consistent policy that we follow when it comes to attribution. Let’s discuss it after the jump, and you can weigh in with your thoughts.

This is really of interest only to hard-core ATL groupies. But if you’d like to know our policy on preserving the anonymity of law students who do embarrassing things — and why we identified the alleged Law Student Spitter by name yesterday, even though we generally keep names out of summer associate stories — then check out the statement we issued to the UVA Law Blog.

One caveat: this is our policy with respect to law students. We deal with lawyers — or “attorneys,” if you think the words have different meanings — on more of a case-by-case basis.

David Lat’s Take on Covering the “Felony Arrest Case” [UVA Law Blog]

This morning, we mentioned that Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. talked to the Washington Post about his arrest (the charges have already been dropped). But there is a lot of chatter around the web about this instance of racial profiling — or honest mistake, depending on your point of view.

Writing for the Daily Beast, Professor Gates’s daughter, Elizabeth Gates, conducted an interview with her father.

Meanwhile, Touré — who you might recognize from the wall-to-wall Michael Jackson coverage — channels Malcolm X when he asks, “What do you call a black man with a Ph.D.?”

Of course, I have my own take. But instead of focusing on the arresting police officers, I’m interested in the white lady who called the cops in the first place, and whether she’d be found liable under various theories of good Samaritan laws. I don’t think she met the “reasonable person” standard, but I’m also the guy who thought the person who took Madlyn Primoff’s children to an ice cream shop in the Kaye Scholer Mommy of the Day case was an idiot. At least I’m consistent.

Should we hold so-called “good Samaritans” to a higher standard?

Gatesgate: Racism 101 [True/Slant]
My Daddy, the Jailbird [Daily Beast]
Skip’s Racist Wakeup Call [Daily Beast]
Scholar Says Arrest Will Lead Him To Explore Race in Criminal Justice [Washington Post]

Earlier: Mommy of the Day Madlyn Primoff Gets Conditional Discharge

Ann Althouse, law professor, blogger, from ATL Idol judge, has gotten engaged to a commenter on her blog.

Thank God I’m married. Seriously. I’m so glad that I don’t have to look for love in the comments. Thank you, sweet chocolate Easter Bunny Jesus. I will sacrifice a dozen colored eggs in your honor.

Andrew Sullivan has the bare bones facts:

Ann Althouse gets engaged to … a commenter on her blog. The post that got the ball rolling. Ten days of emailing … and she was ready.

And here’s part of Althouse’s response to Mr. Sullivan:

Andrew, I don’t think you’ve understood the time line here. And why link to the nasty Pandagon on this one? Your post is really disrespectful to me. If you’d watched the Bloggingheads you linked to, you’d know that my fiancé is someone who has interacted with me in writing on my blog for more than 4 years. We decided to meet in person after an exchange of email in December. We met in January and then, after a some additional email, decided to meet again in mid-February, and then we fell in love. We decided to get married after 2 more weekends and a 10-day spring break.

Well Ann, you have our congratulations. And since I don’t know what else to say, I’ve just turned on the LEWW-signal. Maybe we’ll get some expert commentary shortly.

Update (2:37): After the jump, LEWW answers the call and weighs in.

No Comment Possible [Daily Dish]
Love in the Time of Commenters [Bloggingheads]
Uh Oh. [Althouse]

Here at Above the Law, we thrive on taking a vat of hydrochloric acid to the veneer of the legal profession and exposing the original craftsmanship underneath. Nothing is sacred.

When given the opportunity to serve for Blawg Review — the “blog carnival for everyone interested in law” — I was excited to take Above the Law’s brand of rousing rabble out on the road. How many “Sacred Cows” are out there? How many can I hunt and grill? And as Denise Howell might ask me on her “Yo Comments Are Whack” podcast: “how many cow jokes can you take in one week before you end up on a liposuction table?” Eric Turkewitz already tussled with Oprah this week, so the easiest mark has already been bagged.

Of course, ATL is also a news organization. So while I had high hopes of continuing my friendly banter with Loyola Law School Dean Victor Gold, the news of the week inexorably pushes me in one direction. Luckily, it turns out that the thing everybody was blogging about this week is the biggest sacred cow of all, and it is ripe for poaching.

Let’s do this, after the jump.

* NBC was criticized by the Department of Homeland Security for a series on war criminals that enforcers say could interfere with their investigations. [The New York Times]

* Raising questions about human rights, the State Department expressed concern about a Chinese blogger who has been indefinitely detained. [CNN.com]

* The artist of highly popular Obama posters Shepard Fairey filed a pre-emptive lawsuit against the AP, which accused him of copyright infringement. [The International Herald Tribune]

* Investors suing feeder funds that invested their money with Madoff will be fighting an uphill legal battle. [Bloomberg.com]

* Alan Dershowitz on bringing Israel before the International Criminal Court. [The Huffington Post]

As the Above the Law community continues to grow, more people are posting absurd, inane, and arguably offensive comments. And more people are complaining about those comments — in the comments, as well by email and other means.

Here at ATL, we reserve the right to moderate comments as we see fit. We delete comments for reasons including (but not limited to) offensiveness, abusiveness, excessive profanity, irrelevance, or rank stupidity. Above the Law is a privately owned website, and we have no obligation to provide our bandwidth to any particular user.

But we also offer this recommendation to people who are offended by the comments: don’t read them. Toward that end, we want to make it easier for you to avoid the comments if you want to. Over the next 24 hours, we’ll be changing our site design so that comments will default to “hidden.” If you want to see the comments, you must affirmatively opt-in, by clicking a button to reveal them (either the “show them anyway” button within the post, or the “comments” button / counter on the front page).

Read more — and see for yourself how this policy will work — after the jump.

We always appreciate mentions of Above the Law in other publications (and we get annoyed when ATL isn’t given proper credit for breaking stories.). Here are a few recent shout-outs:

1. Chill of Salary Freezes Reaches Top Law Firms [New York Times]

We previously linked to Eilene Zimmerman’s article in Morning Docket, but in case you missed it, check it out here. An excerpt:

Although many associates are angry about the freezes, others are relieved, said David Lat, founding editor of AboveTheLaw.com, a blog about law firms and the profession.

“There is this sense that firms didn’t act prudently during the boom and now they are getting religion, and that it’s better late than never,” Mr. Lat said. “Many associates we have spoken to think the freeze probably saved jobs.”

2. Gauging the net worth [Legal Week]

This article, by Alex Aldridge, focuses primarily on the social networking and blogging scene over in the U.K., but there is some discussion of what’s going on here in the States:

[T]he US legal blogging community is a fascinating case study in itself, having grown up in the wake of the controversial lawyer message boards Greedy Associates. So influential did the irreverent site come as a means for junior lawyers to pass around information that they were regarded as playing a key role in the pay wars of 1999 and 2000, as news of tit-for-tat pay rises among US law firms raced around the web.

3. Obama re-takes oath of office at the White House [CNN]

The always-playful legal Web site Above the Law asked readers to answer an online poll. About 48 percent blamed Roberts, just 17 percent blame Obama, and 35 percent said yes to the statement, “They both sucked.”

4. Back to School with Professor (and Federal Appeals Judge) Alex Kozinski [American Lawyer]

A short write-up, by Ben Hallman, of our recent event at Columbia Law School, an interview with Chief Judge Alex Kozinski (9th Cir.).

Chill of Salary Freezes Reaches Top Law Firms [New York Times]
Gauging the net worth [Legal Week]
Obama re-takes oath of office at the White House [CNN]
Back to School with Professor (and Federal Appeals Judge) Alex Kozinski [American Lawyer]

Deidre Dare is a senior lawyer in Allen & Overy’s Russia office. Like many an expat, she’s been maintaining a website, presumably to keep folks back home up to date on her life and to share the splendor of living abroad with random strangers on the Internet.

On the website, Philosophy Can Be Sexy, she posts poetry, photos of herself in lingerie, “philosophy” (if a quote from the “Marriage Delusion” counts), and a serialized novel about the expat life in Moscow.

Allen & Overy was not too pleased to discover the novel. Per the Daily Mail:

Miss Dare, who is thought to earn £150,000 a year at the firm’s Russian office, is calling her steamy online novel, Expat: A Weekly Serialized Novel About Living in Moscow.

It describes the sordid lifestyle pursued by staff at a British-led professional firm in the capital.

Miss Dare’s promiscuous heroine describes herself as a ‘part drug addict, part alcoholic’ who regularly turns up for work hours late and hungover.

She and her colleagues are constantly seeking new sexual conquests, attend obscene sex shows involving donkeys and dwarves, blow fortunes at expensive restaurants and gossip about where they are planning to get drunk next.

Sounds like working abroad is like being a summer associate all year long. An erotic excerpt for the grammarians among you, after the jump.

Muzeview, which calls itself a “competitive intelligence services provider working with professional services firms,” has completed a new analysis of the internet strength of major law firms.

“This new index gives a clear view into the weight each firm gives to its visibility on the Internet, as well as the effectiveness of the effort,” said Paul Gladen, founder and president of Muzeview. “Some firms, such as Morrison & Foerster and WilmerHale, are showing a good profile on industry blogs, which means their Web strategy is paying off in terms of getting the firm discussed among the online legal community.”

The number one firm on the web is apparently Jones Day:

The Index, released today, shows a number one ranking for Jones Day, the Cleveland, OH-based firm with 2,204 lawyers, by no means the largest. DLA Piper and Baker & McKenzie, the two largest US law firms in terms of 2007 revenue and number of lawyers, ranked third and fourth respectively.

Even though the rankings take into account the number of times firms are mentioned on “industry related blogs,” Cadwalader doesn’t crack the top 25. Maybe the perception of some of the CWT defenders doesn’t match reality?

Check out the top 25 after the jump and see if your firm is one that people like to talk about.

* Anti-government demonstrators in Thailand swarmed around the Parliament building Monday, delaying the new legislature’s first meeting. [International Herald Tribune]

* Bloggers beware! A Maryland court will decide whether authors who write critical comments on-line under pseudonyms will have to reveal their identity. (yikes!) [The Baltimore Sun]

* New York chief court judge Judith Kaye officially retires Wednesday. Now a highly celebrated Judge, Kaye was not an easy sell when Cuomo appointed her to the state court of appeals. [The New York Times]

* US Courts will stil see a steady flow of terrorism threat cases, even when Obama is president. [The Washington Times]

* In light of recent events in Gaza, the Iranian cabinet has decided file suit against Israeli officials in international courts. [Trend News Agency]

* Holiday sales were the worst in 40 years, so expect to see a ton of bankruptcies and take-overs in the near future. [Bloomberg]