Legal 491S 1st Post

In doing the reading for this week, the articles pertaining to myspace and facebook were particularly important to me. I have long been interested in the idea of schools status of in loco parentis. This seems to be the basis of the justification of the schools' suspension of students who defame the administrators at schools. However, if the action is done on a computer that is not the property of the school, then regardless of who the person is defaming, the school technically has no power. If an administrator who felt they were hurt by any students' remarks on a site such as myspace, they could take legal action for defamation of character or libel.

However, though I do not support the administration's punishing of students for actions that are NOT school related, I do understand the invasion of privacy that these people feel. However, as students have learned from schools partroling their facebooks, privacy is going by the wayside more and more as the internet becomes a bigger part of daily life. Even on this campus there have been numerous issues where Resident Assitants have lost their jobs due to questionable behavior as posted in pictures on facebook. Theoretically, the school is over-reaching when they discipline these students. In some cases, the pictures supposedly had under-age drinking, however, the liquid in the cups could be anything. Legally, the students could be in trouble for this behavior, however, unless the police are patrolling facebook (as was mentioned in the article), the students behavior is (debatably) unethical.

The point is that there is necessity in creating new ways of dispute resolution and new laws to keep up with the pace of the internet.