Brittan Heller and Heide Iravani, two typically hyperaccomplished women from Yale Law School, have recently had restored to them one newfangled inalienable right—a right yet to be enumerated in the United States Constitution but one that, increasingly, seems just about as essential. Once again, they can do Google searches on themselves and not see a torrent of abusive falsehoods pop up on the computer screen.

Type in Brittan Heller, for instance, and you now get her article in the Yale Law Journal on genocide and something about her appearance years ago on Teen Jeopardy. For Iravani, there’s a LinkedIn link and a reference to her canvassing in high school for the Sierra Club. Scroll down, though, and you’ll find shocking remnants of what the two women have been subjected to in the past couple of years, not only when they Googled themselves but whenever a law firm or a classmate or a date—or anyone else, for that matter—checked them out. “Is Brittan Heller a lying bitch?” screams one link. “Heide Iravani deserves to be raped,” shrieks another.

Those comments originated on AutoAdmit, a popular forum for law students and, sometimes, the lawyers who recruit and hire them. AutoAdmit bills itself as “the most prestigious law-school discussion board in the world” and claims to have 700,000 unique visitors a month. When it comes to Heller and Iravani, some of them were unique all right: uniquely sadistic, subjecting the women to what can only be called a cyber-stoning, in which participants vied to hurl the biggest rock. They wrote, falsely, that Heller has herpes and had bribed her way into Yale—helped by a secret lesbian affair with the dean of admissions—and that Iravani has gonorrhea, is addicted to heroin, and had exchanged oral sex with Yale Law School’s dean for a passing grade in civil procedure. The spectacle was either astonishingly horrific or almost banal, depending on how old and what sex you are, on what you deem funny, and on how much time you spend on the internet. And where.

Autoadmit, like innumerable other sites catering to a particular profession or community, is comparatively obscure. What makes it matter to the world at large is Google, which collects whatever AutoAdmit and millions of other websites make available and then spews the results out around the planet. A Google search is the new universal background check and is unfettered, unfiltered, and nearly impossible to appeal. But not to manipulate. To ensure that their calumnies topped the Google cache, AutoAdmit posters filed multiple slurs about both women—a practice known as Google bombing—to crowd out or shove down anything else.

Were Google and AutoAdmit newspapers or television stations, Heller and Iravani would have had a ready remedy: They could sue. Someone printing or airing falsehoods or statements likely to defame or cause extreme emotional distress couldn’t then simply walk away. But different rules apply to internet intermediaries: Websites like Google and AutoAdmit merely deliver content rather than producing it themselves. Just over a decade ago, seeking to encourage the free flow of information on the internet and itself under pressure from telecommunications companies, Congress passed legislation stating that such websites could not be sued for carrying defamatory material. The measure in question is Section 230(c) of what has surely become one of the most striking misnomers on the books: the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

As a result, two entirely different brands of discourse have developed. In the traditional media, things remain reasonably decorous. But online the promise of anonymity, though far flimsier than most suspect, unlocks something ugly and menacing in ostensibly normal people. And while anything goes in the Google era, everything also stays, and spreads. The whole world is now the bathroom wall, and that wall can never be entirely painted over.

With the online carriers off-limits, the two women have pursued their anonymous tormentors directly. In June 2007, they sued dozens of them in federal court in New Haven for defamation, invasion of privacy, and infliction of emotional distress. “Hiding behind pseudonyms and the smug assumption that their carefully aimed hostility can pass as merely juvenile misconduct,” the charges read, electronic wraiths trashed Heller and Iravani “for the sheer joy of destruction.” The online monikers leap off the title pages of otherwise solemn-looking court documents: Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey, The Ayatollah of Rock-n-Rollah, hitlerhitlerhitler, Dirty Nigger, Sleazy Z, stanfordtroll, lonelyvirgin, Yalels2009, ak47, et al.

Who are they? Not just the usual geeks and misfits, but also, as one AutoAdmit poster put it, “some of the best-informed smart-ass procrastinating wannabe lawyers in the world.” Some came from Yale Law School, leaving Heller and Iravani to ponder whether the staid and respectable guy sitting alongside them in class was the very same fellow who had just trashed them on the Web.

The women, whose case is in the pretrial stage, stand at the forefront of a growing number of people taking to the courts to unmask their online attackers. A former board member of the World Chess Federation has accused chess grandmaster Susan Polgar and her husband of anonymously posting obscene messages about him. (They have denied the charges.) A onetime Vogue Australia cover model has gone after a nameless blogger who called her “a psychotic, lying, whoring...skank.” The former mayor of Manalapan, New Jersey, is trying to uncover who called him, among other things, a liar, a crook, a bum, a pedophile, an alcoholic, and a wife beater.