Judge Melvin and the World Wide Web
Mike Fuoco mentioned it in his summing-up of indicted Supreme Court justice Joan Orie Melvin's career on Saturday, and Chris Briem highlights it too: the curious early Internet case of Melvin versus the anonymous website Grantstreet 99.
The story is not about some lone contrarian voice, nor about any particular accusation highlighted on the site at all... but the lengths then superior court Judge Orie-Melvin went to silence the web site and its author. Why? She didn't like the criticism. So the then anonymous webmaster ('blog' was yet to be coined) was sued for defamation in Common Pleas Court... after Orie-Melvin had been denied standing to sue in Virginia.
The litigation of Grantstreet99 would in the end be decided by none other than the ubiquitous Judge Wettick, and eventually backed by the state supreme court, who ruled against Judge Orie-Melvin and protected the anonymity of the GS99 author.
Dennis Roddy judged the then-judge thusly in 1999:
It will, in the end, be for courts to decide if Judge Melvin has a case or not. Certainly, it will look even worse if she drops the matter after flushing out the identity of the low-level apparatchik who has riled her. But free speech, and leadership for that matter, are usually less dependent on legal niceties than on the decisions, one-by-one, of individuals with the power to get even, to instead overlook offensive criticism because they cherish the larger ideal in which it resides.
That, by the way, is what I would look for in a state Supreme Court justice.
Judge Melvin, let the matter drop. You are starting to look like a bully.