The story is here; an excerpt:
[L]aw firm Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge
rescinded its job offer to Anthony Ciolli, the 3L at Penn Law who
resigned as “Chief Education Director” of AutoAdmit last month. He
resigned in the wake of a WaPo exposé
on how the site in part served as a platform for attacks and defamatory
remarks about female law students, among others….Charles DeWitt, managing partner at Edwards Angell’s Boston office,
where Ciolli was slated to be a litigation associate, told the Law
Blog: “He worked for us last summer. He’s not going to work for us in
the fall….”On
April 11, just over a month after the WaPo story ran, DeWitt sent a
letter to Ciolli stating that the firm had recently learned of the
controversy involving AutoAdmit, in particular its “off-topic” message
board, and that “the information we now have raises serious concerns
about your joining our firm.”DeWitt wrote that the content
of the messages on the board are “antithetical” to the values of the
firm and the “principles of collegiality and respect that members of
the legal profession should observe in their dealings with other
lawyers.” DeWitt pointed out that in an online letter to
another blogger, Ciolli and his partner Jarret Cohen identified
themselves as AutoAdmit’s administrators and defended its “free,
uninhibited exchange of ideas.”DeWitt continued: “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. . . . ” He wrote, his resignation from
the site was “too late to ameliorate our concerns.”
Alas, this is hardly surprising. As I wrote two years ago regarding the fact that Mr. Ciolli still did not "realize what he is doing to his professional reputation":
If you run a web site that features rampant racism, anti-semitism,
homophobia, and sexism; that includes numerous tortious (often per se
libelous) attacks on female professors at Penn; on students at Penn,
Stanford, Berkeley, Pomona, and elsewhere; on various Deans at Penn;
and on law professors elsewhere; and if you do nothing about any of
this (even when asked), then you are inviting serious trouble and
professional ruin.
Sadly, Mr. Ciolli did not listen. Even more sadly, he and Mr. Cohen allowed dozens of people to be viciously defamed, harassed, humiliated, and threatened with sexual and criminal violence.
UPDATE: This post by a female law student at NYU is also informative.




Indeed that remark resonates with our topic, but note that it comes from a very early and never published essay.…