Attack-blogger Crystal Cox---exercising her rights, jeopardizing yours.

One thing that the public just doesn’t understand about lawyers is that their job sometimes involves fighting for the most despicable people imaginable, because those despicable people have legal objectives they have a right to pursue as citizens, and because the principles underlying the fight are important, even if the particular clients—and often their objectives too–are blights on humanity.

Over at Popehat, Ken has chronicled a classic example, in which First Amendment specialist Eugene Volokh (he of the Volokh Conspiracy) and the Electronic Freedom Foundation are backing blogger Crystal Cox as she appeals a $2.5 million defamation judgment against her, in which an Oregon judge ruled that bloggers did not have the same protection against defamation claims under the First Amendment as journalists do. Cox, of whom I was blissfully unaware until Ken’s post, is clearly the kind of person who is a menace on the internet, lacking basic decency, fairness, scruples and common sense, and yet stimulated by the power that the medium provides her. The signature act that established this for me is revealed by Ken at the top of his post:

“Here’s the most important thing you need to know about blogger and “investigative journalist” Crystal Cox: when she got angry at First Amendment attorney Marc Randazza, she didn’t just register the domains marcrandazza.com and fuckmarcrandazza.com and marcrandazzasucks.com in order to attack him. She registered jenniferrandazza.com and nataliarandazza.com — the names of Randazza’s wife and three-year-old daughter.”

Yup, that’s enough, all right: signature significance. Is there any chance that an individual who would do this even once could be an ethical, reasonable, fair person?  No! Only an unethical creep would even consider such conduct; with a normal person, the ethics alarms would be ringing so loud that they would be paralyzing. Continue reading →