Legal Commentary

What to say about The Phone Call?  "Nothing" would be a prudent response, and so far the legal blogosphere hasn't lit up about it -- but it's early yet.  My early returns on Facebook are that my liberal friends believe Virginia Thomas is, to use language used about another woman in another context, "a little bit nutty."  It is an occasion for jokes about Clarence Thomas, disdain for his wife, and renewed support for Anita Hill.  It becomes a bookend with the story last week about Virginia Thomas's prominent (and to my mind undignified) Tea Party activism.  One supposes one will see mirror-image comments from the other side.  (And yes, I have some FB friends on that side as well, although fewer, and have seen one mirror-image comment so far.)  Perhaps the ickiness factor will mostly limit responses to the story to Facebook comments and tweets rather than full-blown commentary.  

I have only one thing to say about the story, which mostly strikes me as an illustration of the messiness of human lives rather than a deep political story: if anyone will have anything interesting to say about it, it ought to be the privacy scholars, many of whom are also bloggers.  What strikes me the most about this story is that we know about it at all.  I find something disturbing and off-putting about a sentence in a news story about it that says: "Ms. Hill played the recording, from her voice mail at Brandeis University, for The New York Times."  It does not take a position on the truth or falsity of Hill's original allegations (I tend to believe them, for what it's worth, although I don't take a strong position on the matter; and whether they are true or not says nothing about whether Virginia Thomas herself believes they are true or false) to wonder why she replayed these words for a reporter, or why she turned it over to Brandeis campus security or asked for an FBI investigation.  I understand why she found the message offensive, but have a harder time concluding that she genuinely thought the message was a serious threat.  My sense is that the best explanation for why Hill replayed the message to the media and brought it to official attention is that she concluded that revenge is a dish best served cold.

Perhaps our privacy scholars, who are generally so concerned with public disclosures of essentially private facts, and who ought to be concerned to distinguish between genuine threats and genuinely private affairs, will have more to say on this incident, even if it entails a possible reversal of their natural sympathies for the persons involved.  Co-Op, I'm looking at you.