Last month's fake controversy du jour—complete with false accusations and selective presentation of evidence ("Lebron-gate" for short)–included an appearance of the weirdest trope to infect philosophy cyberspace over the last couple of years, a variation on "think of the children!"  This is the idea that criticizing a graduate student (even if you didn't intend to, and even if you didn't use his name!) is a line that can not be crossed in the minds of some putatively "professional" philosophers.   One aspect of this I find puzzling is that in academic law and its associated social media, no such norm is recognized by anyone (I realize it's not recognized by most philosophers either, but the question is why philosophy social media behaves so differently).  So, for example, right-wing law professor David Bernstein (George Mason)–an always reliable apologist for Israeli crimes and punishment of anti-Israeli speech–here chastises by name a law student at the University of Texas at Austin who disrupted a speech by an Israeli.  (As a sidenote, I think universities should prevent these kinds of disruptions, and not just of Israelis.)  Academic law blogs did not erupt in horror (real or feigned) that Prof. Bernstein had criticized a "mere" student.   And Bernstein did this on a much bigger platform, a blog nominally hosted by the Washington Post.

Maybe academic philosophy is just more of a hotbed of New Infantilism and faux-sensitivity than academic law?  That's probably true, but I think there are some other factors at work; in no particular order:

(1)  There is no culture among law students of feeling "vulnerable" and in need of "protection," whereas there clearly is in philosophy cyberspace (recall the bizarre letter from some Harvard PhD students regarding the Marquette case).

(2)  There is more respect for free speech norms among law students and professors than among philosophers; this is not surprising, given the strong libertarian tendencies of American free speech law.  As a result, there is more skepticism about the idea that certain topics can't be broached (and especially when it is something as odd as "not criticizing a student").

(3)  Any individual law faculty member has far less power over any individual law student than a professor in a PhD program has over an individual PhD student.  This is clearly true, but it would justify caution in speaking about one's own students, but that doesn't appear to be what is at issue in any of the cases I can think of.

(4)  The job market for PhD students is sufficiently precarious that any criticism might fatally damage them.  I suspect many believe this, though I'm not sure what the evidence is for that.  And law firms are, as far as I can tell, far more sensitive to negative publicity than philosophy departments, so one might expect a similar level of anxiety in that case as well.  But I suspect it is some version of this consideration, however ill-founded, that accounts for the hysterical overreaction we see in cyberspace if a graduate student is criticized, even meritoriously.