But the Yale lawsuit has sparked considerably greater interest than the others, many of which remain tabloid curiosities. It’s a test case for the fragility, in the internet era, of one’s professional reputation and for what—if anything—can or should be done to protect it. Heller and Iravani, who both declined to comment, are seeking monetary damages—though, given the paltry resources of some of their adversaries, the two women may not get much. They are trying to reclaim their good names and guard against career harm. They’re also trying to send a message: that even in the wild world of the internet, smearing comes at a cost. Perhaps they’re hoping that by tracking down, outing, and punishing a few loudmouths, they can muzzle—or at least sober up—an exponentially greater number.

Though they do not raise the issue explicitly in their suit, Heller and Iravani may even end up helping prompt a change in the law: forcing internet intermediaries to bear greater responsibility for what they carry. Frank Pasquale, an authority on internet law at Seton Hall University’s law school, predicted that the case could hasten calls to make intermediaries take down offensive material, in the same way they must remove pirated copyrighted material. The suit’s potential impact helps explain why one of the country’s leading litigation boutiques, the San Francisco law firm Keker & Van Nest, is representing the women for free. But Keker is proceeding cautiously. The firm does some legal work for Google, and according to a figure close to the plaintiffs, the company has demanded that the lawyers neither challenge Section 230(c) directly nor erode its protections. (The plaintiffs’ chief lawyer, Mark Lemley, said this is not so. A Google spokesman said the company backs current interpretations of that law, which he says “enable the free expression of hundreds of millions of individuals,” but declined to comment on any conversations with Keker.)

In the 21 months since they filed suit, the women have already made some headway. But there are also accusations that the victims are becoming victimizers. Some of the defendants say the case amounts to an all-expenses-paid elitist temper tantrum in which two privileged women have cast an overly broad net, thus failing to differentiate between the really wicked and some of the tamer flamers, and have jeopardized careers in ways far more serious than theirs ever have been. One way or another, their suit highlights a culture and a legal system that still aren’t quite sure how freely people can or should speak online, how seriously to take what they say, and whether they can or should be sued for saying it.   

AutoAdmit—the name refers to applicants with grades and test scores high enough to be admitted to law school without much deliberation—was created five years ago by an insurance broker in Allentown, Pennsylvania, named Jarret Cohen, who was 20 years old at the time. He never aspired to law school; he never even went to college. But he frequented the uninhibited online discussion board of the Princeton Review, an educational testing company. When it began filtering out some of the more inflammatory posts, people abandoned it in droves. Cohen quickly created an alternative board, whose appeal, as one poster put it, was that “no thread, ever, would get vaporized by the thought police.” He targeted law students, since that niche was largely unfilled. Besides, he found their conversations witty and intelligent.

Cohen then took on a sidekick, Anthony Ciolli, a 20-year-old wunderkind who had completed Cornell in two years before moving on to the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Cohen controlled the message boards; Ciolli supplied research, such as the rankings of law schools and firms. This earned him the title of “chief education director” in the two-man operation, which Cohen ran from his house. For its first two years, AutoAdmit carried no advertising; in 2006, Cohen signed up with Google AdSense, which supplies particular advertisers suited to a given website’s content. Advertising typically brought in about $1,000 a month.

Many other websites control extremely salacious material either by using special coding to keep it to themselves (so that Google doesn’t pick it up) or by filtering it out, particularly if asked to do so. But AutoAdmit was a place, one poster told me, where you could tell someone to “fuck off and die” and not get banned. The site’s on-topic stuff was standard fare having to do with getting and succeeding. But off-topic threads were full of obscene bluster and ritualized intramural insult. Posters appeared to be overwhelmingly male; it was women, particularly beautiful women, particularly beautiful women at the top law schools, particularly beautiful minority women at the top law schools, who were most often skewered, dissected, and fantasized about.

Ciolli, who posted regularly, became Auto­Admit’s public face, although he insists he didn’t control what went—or stayed—up. Pleas to remove threads usually came to him; he’d generally pass them on to Cohen, and Cohen, who rarely posted on the site, would generally ignore them. To both, even its depravity was a public service. “One finds a much deeper and much more mature level of insight in a community where the ugliest depths of human opinion are confronted, rather than ignored,” Cohen wrote in a March 2005 email to Eugene Volokh, a professor at UCLA Law School and the author of a popular law blog.