It’s the day after Election Day! Granted, this year’s election cycle wasn’t nearly as exciting as last year — when Obama ended racism in America.

Still, there are many winners to congratulate. Republicans Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell are new governors. People can now point to the North Country on a map of New York State. Michael Bloomberg secured a third term as New York City Mayor. And the New York Post (predictably) managed to ignore it all and plastered of picture of Pedro Martinez in a diaper on its front page.

But for our purposes, the biggest winners were the voters of Maine. They successfully defeated the efforts of gays and lesbians to be treated fairly, thus making sure that all of those rugged and earthy Mainers will not be tempted to have the gay sex they secretly desire.

Obviously the tactics of BC Law professor Scott Fitzgibbon — and other defenders of traditional marriages between drunken woodsmen and the girls they knock up — won the day. Do gay marriage advocates have any more tricks stashed in their closets?

Kash says yes, 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.

A high school principal in Indiana doesn’t want slutty-seeming students playing sports, reports Courthouse News Service.

Two sophomores attended a summer slumber party with other girls from Churubusco High School. They did what all high school girls do at slumber parties (at least in the imagination of high school boys). From their complaint [PDF]:

During the sleepover the girls took pictures of themselves pretending to kiss or lick a large multi-colored novelty lollipop shaped phallus that they had purchased as well as pictures of themselves in lingerie with dollar bills stuck in their clothes as well as other pictures.

Ed. note: See this comment. Should that read “phallus-shaped lollipop”?

The girls later posted these photos on MySpace. Someone among their MySpace “friends” printed the pics and gave them to the principal. The principal decided the girls had violated the school’s code of conduct and suspended them from all extracurricular activities, including athletics, for the entire school year.

The ACLU thinks the principal is a sucker, and has stepped in to help the girls sue their school.

If you were hoping for the AutoAdmit lawsuit to result in courtroom drama, with Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey breaking down in tears on the stand, then we’re sorry to disappoint you. The case has ended, somewhat anticlimactically.

Last week, the plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed their case against the remaining defendants. From the Hartford Courant:

Two former Yale University law school students have quietly settled a high-profile lawsuit they brought against about two dozen anonymous authors who the students said defamed and threatened them by posting malicious falsehoods on an Internet message board.

Perhaps plaintiff Brittan Heller felt ready to put down her sword, now that she’s happily married. But note that the dismissal is without prejudice (so check yo self, Pauliewalnuts).

What did the plaintiffs get out of filing their lawsuit?

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.

* Free speech goes head to head with campaign finance laws at the Supreme Court today. [Washington Independent]

* The 9th Circuit ruled that John Ashcroft can be sued by a Muslim man who suffered under the former AG’s anti-terrorism strategies. [Washington Post]

* An Ohio judge makes his scarlet letter neon yellow. [New York Daily News]

* Judges are the ones regulating Wall Street. [Bloomberg]

* An ex-partner in Florida has sued the chairman of his former firm for wrongfully firing him after a confrontation over firm funds being used to support Hillary Clinton, among other misdeeds. [Courthouse News Service]

* In Texas classrooms, Obama is shunned, but Bibles may be a requirement. [Houston Chronicle]

* More retired judges do it for free. Now in North Carolina. [Raleigh News & Observer]

My wife and I live four blocks away from my mother. I have a little bit of experience balancing one’s mother and one’s wife and not getting crushed by a domestic pincer attack of disastrous consequences.

As any good husband-son will tell you, the best policy is to stay far, far away from any skirmishes between your wife and your mother. Never underestimate the power of “selective deafness.” My wife and my mother can be having a conversation right in front of me, and if I hear something that could lead to conflict, I can “un-hear” statements before they make it to my hippocampus. All I hear is “First-and-ten on the Dallas 40. Manning drops back … incomplete.”

Later I can agree with my wife’s interpretation and my mother’s interpretation with perfect honesty. What do I know? I wasn’t even there!

Of course, such familial gymnastics might not be possible if my wife were a public person. For instance, my mother-in-law lives thousands of miles away. I like that. On the public forum of this blog, all you’ll ever hear me say is “my mother-in-law is the bestest most awesomest person ever! It only took her a decade to learn how to pronounce my name!”

New York comedian Sunda Croonquist apparently doesn’t have my skill for tact. Her act, which has been featured on Comedy Central, apparently contains a number of jokes made at her mother-in-law’s expense.

Is she hoping to get a sitcom? Probably. But instead she’s earned a defamation lawsuit — filed by her mother-in-law.

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]

Time for a quick follow-up on Monday’s post about NYU Law School’s controversial decision to invite Dr. Li-ann Thio, an outspoken proponent of criminalizing gay sex, to teach a course on human rights in the fall. The post generated almost 300 comments, many of them quite thoughtful — like this one:

I am a gay man living in Singapore. I have lived in Asia (including Singapore) for over 15 years. So, I have firsthand knowledge of the discriminatory environment for gay men and lesbians living in Singapore.

I am not sure what the administrators of NYU Law School were thinking when they hired Dr. Thio to teach “human rights” in Asia. Asking a Singaporean tenured at a Singapore government-funded university to teach about human rights in Asia is like asking a Ku Klux Klan grandmaster to teach about racial equality. She will simply be a mouthpiece for the Singapore government’s positions on human rights issues. If Dr. Thio espoused views opposed to the Singapore government’s - trust me - she would not be teaching at the National University of Singapore. As everyone in the international human rights community knows, the Singapore government is not a “model” example for upholding human rights.

So Dr. Thio may not have been the best person in the galaxy to pick as a visiting professor of human rights. On the other hand, her views — definitely unorthodox in the American legal academy — could generate healthy and informative debate (like what we saw in our comments).

In our reader poll, which attracted over 3,000 votes, over 55 percent of you supported NYU’s decision to host Dr. Li-ann Thio. Not surprisingly, given the freewheeling, irreverent comments on this site, ATL readers are pro-free speech.

And so is the NYU OUTLaw Board, to its credit. In the wake of our coverage, the board issued a statement criticizing Li-ann Thio’s views, but simultaneously observing that it is “best to fight Dr. Thio’s offensive views not by silencing her but by engaging in a respectful and productive dialogue about the boundaries of human rights.”

The full OUTLaw statement — plus an adult-themed reader poll, by popular request — after the jump.

Academic freedom is a beautiful thing, essential to our nation’s celebrated system of higher education. And, to borrow the words of Dick Cheney on gay marriage, “freedom means freedom for everyone” — including people whose ideas we might not like, or even find repugnant.

How far should academic freedom extend? That’s an issue being faced right now at NYU Law School. The following message went out to the law student community last week:

Dear Student,

We are writing on behalf of OUTLaw, NYU Law’s LGBT student group, to raise awareness of anti-gay statements made by a NYU visiting professor. Dr. Li-ann Thio, a professor at the National University of Singapore, will be teaching Human Rights Law in Asia during the Fall 2009 semester as a Global Visiting Professor of Law at NYU.

In 2007, the Singaporean Parliament was considering repealing 377A - the statute criminalizing consensual sex between men in Singapore. Dr. Thio, a Nominated Member of Parliament, gave a speech before Parliament arguing against the repeal. In her speech supporting the continued criminalization of “acts of gross indecency” between two males, she made such statements as, “You cannot make a human wrong a human right,” “Diversity is not a license for perversity,” and that anal sex is like “shoving a straw up your nose to drink” (http://theonlinecitizen.com/2007/10/377a-serves-public-morality-nmp-thio-li-ann). The efforts to repeal 377A failed, and consensual sex between men is still illegal in Singapore.

While respecting Dr. Thio’s right to her opinion and without questioning her teaching abilities, OUTLaw believes it is important for LGBT students and allies to be aware of her views in order to make fully informed decisions regarding class registration. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact the OUTLaw Board at nyu.outlaw@gmail.com.

The NYU OUTLaw Board

Links to videos of her speech to the Parliament: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWqp3mLz4ko (part 1), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUDYo29gNNg (part 2), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPIdp0qXZy4 (part 3)”

The videos are worth checking out (especially if you’re a high school debater wanting to relive your glory days). Dr. Thio speaks persuasively and with conviction, supporting her argument against gay sex with an impressively broad range of sources, from the Bible to Immanuel Kant to contemporary bloggers. One would expect nothing less from someone with her dazzling educational pedigree: a BA from Oxford, an LLM from Harvard Law School, and a PhD from Cambridge. Don’t call her Dr. TTThio!

Additional discussion, plus a reader poll, after the jump.

The second panel we attended at the recent convention of the American Constitution Society (ACS) focused on a topic near and dear to our heart: free speech on the internet.

The panel, The Internet Revolution and Its Effect on the First Amendment, featured the following participants:

We know you can’t use the f-word as a verb or noun on television. Just to be clear, you can’t use it as an adjective either. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Supreme Court is giving tentative approval to government regulation of the use of even a single curse word on live television.

Somehow, this is all Bono’s fault. Bloody hell.

But the SCOTUS ruling wasn’t a complete loss for free speech advocates:

But the court, in a 5-4 decision Tuesday, is refusing to pass judgment on whether the Federal Communications Commission’s “fleeting expletives” policy is in line with First Amendment guarantees of free speech. The justices say a federal appeals court should weigh the constitutionality of the policy.

Justice Scalia delivered the opinion for the 5-4 majority.

Court Upholds FCC ‘Fleeting Expletive’ Rule [Wall Street Journal]

* Woody Allen wants $10 million from American Apparel for putting Woody-Allen look-a-likes on billboards without his permission. [The New York Post]

* The Supreme Court will decide if a federal law that prohibits selling videos depicting animal cruelty is a violation of free speech. [The Los Angeles Times]

* A Georgia Lawyer pleaded guilty to a $28 million ponzi scheme, which defrauded 125 people, including some senior citizens who gave their life savings. [The Atlanta Journal-Constitution]

* Dole fruit has accused attorneys of recruiting people to give fake testimony that pesticides sterilized them when they worked on Nicaraguan banana farms. [The Los Angeles Times]

* Civil Libertarians are starting to question Obama, as he resembles Bush on issues related to terror detainees. [Time]

Back in 2007, two female Yale Law School students filed a lawsuit over allegedly defamatory and threatening comments written about them on AutoAdmit.com. The stuff written went way beyond lobsters and buttcheeks, and the women said the resulting Google hits on their names did serious damage to their job prospects.

The case was near and dear to ATL readers’ hearts in its challenge to the culture of anonymous online commentary, as the YLS students sought to out their unknown assailants (including the incongruously-named :D and more appropriately-named AK47) through the course of litigation. We covered the various twists and turns of the case, but hadn’t heard anything since last summer.

The newest issue of Portfolio Magazine has the case on its cover. In Slimed Online, David Margolick identifies the YLS plaintiffs as Brittan Heller and Heide Iravani and explores the legal ramifications for cyber bullying.

The article is a great read, and we’d advise checking it out. We’re a big fan of the writer: Margolick covered the O.J. Simpson trial as the New York Times national legal correspondent in the 90s, and was one of Kash’s favorite journalism professors last semester.

For the lazy among you, we have chosen some highlights, including the “where are they now” grafs (hint: hello, Cleary). Find out whether job prospects were really damaged, after the jump.

Over at f/k/a, David Giacalone wonders why few people have taken a stand on Harvey Silverglate’s outrageous contention that the “Harvard Factor” has somehow killed satire in the legal profession.

Stand at my wall and start screaming “Hektor,” why don’t you?

Professor Silverglate reminds me of the guy, Dr. Pritchard I believe, who wrote the poetry textbook in Dead Poets Society. He tries to make objective the subjective art of “comedy,” despite the fact that he is not funny.

Silverglate is annoyed that so many people reacted poorly to the New Yorker cover of Barack Obama dressed up in so-called “muslin” attire. His reasoning for the backlash over the cover is that “elites” — like Obama — have become so stifled in their thinking that they can no longer take a joke.

He specifically calls out the HLS Parody (full disclosure: I was part of the show each of my three years). He states that none of the humor approaches the frankness or “brutality” of previous incarnations.

Excuse me while I stand on my desk and shout “yawp.”

Maybe back in Silverglate’s day, all the good ‘ol boys could sit around and tell watermelon jokes with impunity. Today, at Harvard and I’d imagine most anywhere else, you can still make fun of racial and gender stereotypes, you just have to be a little bit more intelligent and creative about it. Why? Because “Gee golly, them girls sure can’t drive,” just isn’t funny anymore. It’s called progress.

More ad hominem attacks on Silverglate, after the jump.

The embarrassing Google hit is one of the great new fears of the modern age. If the number-one Google hit for your name is your work bio, Corporate Challenge race-time results, or nothing at all, consider yourself lucky. You could have something worse, like, “Kashmir Hill. Is that her real name or her porn screen name?” Or something much worse, like the derogatory comments that spurred the Autoadmit lawsuit.

Seattle lawyer Shakespear Feyissa is in a Google predicament. He wants a ten-year-old article removed from his college newspaper’s archives. The school administrators say sure, but the college newspaper editors are adamantly opposed. We love principled undergrads. From the Seattle Times:

While a senior at [Seattle Pacific University] 10 years ago, Feyissa was arrested on suspicion of attempted sexual assault and suspended. He was never charged, but the suspension stuck — indefinitely.

Feyissa complained that his punishment was more severe because of his race, he told the student newspaper at the time, but an investigation dismissed his claim.

He’s a lawyer now, and that article — still among the first hits for Feyissa’s name on Google — continues to hurt him personally and professionally, he said. So Feyissa, at 33, has been pressuring SPU to help clear his name.

We question his tactics. By going after the school, he has succeeded in getting the original Falcon article knocked back a few pages when Google searching his name. But due to the media coverage of his crusade, he now has tons of hits with the paragraph intro, “A decade ago Shakespear Feyissa was arrested on suspicion of attempted sexual assault.”

Read more, after the jump.

See the links below for more details. Also note this, from Marc Randazza of the Legal Satyricon:

For anyone who is curious, I have personally spoken to the University of Texas adjunct who happens to bear the [same name as the formerly anonymous defendant known as :D].

He IS NOT the person in question. I would appreciate it if any readers would keep that in mind, and educate anyone who might hold this mistaken belief. I can confirm with 100% certainty that the [individual identified as :D] in the complaint is not an attorney and is not a law professor.

It has been a while since our last posting about the AutoAdmit lawsuit, so feel free to discuss the latest developments in the comments. If you’re not familiar with the case, peruse the postings collected here.

Another Amended Complaint in the Auto Admit Case [Legal Satyricon]
Yale Students’ Lawsuit Unmasks Anonymous Trolls, Opens Pandora’s Box [Wired]
Yale Students Name Austinite Who Allegedly Defamed Them [keyetv.com]
Lawyers for 2 Female Students at Yale Law School Learn Identities of Anonymous Online Attackers [Chronicle of Higher Education]

Gopalan Nair is a Singapore lawyer turned U.S. citizen and blogger. He runs the blog Singapore Dissident.

The lesson we’ve learned from his story: when we launch AboveTheLaw - Singapore, we’ll need to drop the Judge of the Day feature. Nair has been arrested in Singapore for “insulting a public servant”.

According to a court document, Nair is charged with insulting Justice Belinda Ang Saw Ean last Thursday by sending an email which said she “was throughout prostituting herself during the entire proceedings, by being nothing more than an employee of Mr Lee Kuan Yew and his son and carrying out their orders”.

Nair’s lawyer Chia said the comments essentially repeated those Nair made in a recent blog about a defamation case filed by Singapore’s leaders against an opposition party and its members.

In the blog, Nair strongly criticised a three-day legal hearing last week at which Singapore founding father Lee Kuan Yew and his son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, testified.

In another post on his blog Saturday, Nair taunted authorities, saying he was in Singapore at a particular hotel, and also gave his phone number.

“I am now within your jurisdiction… What are you going to do about it?” Nair wrote.

Arrest you and charge you, that’s what. Another lesson learned: Don’t go to Singapore and issue a “nah nah nah boo boo” on your blog. Free speech is better practiced without giving your exact coordinates.

US blogger charged in Singapore over ‘prostituting’ comment [Breitbart]