Attorney Todd Levitt

Mt. Pleasant lawyer Todd Levitt has sued a local newspaper, a reporter, and its parent company for defamation [libel and slander], false light and other torts. The 19-page complaint, coming on the heels of the trial court's dismissal of Levitt's separate defamation suit against other defendants, contains 147 allegations spread across eleven counts.

Interestingly, the new defamation lawsuit also names the opposing counsel in the first case as well as two professors who teach in Central Michigan University's College of Business Administration.  For his part, opposing counsel has filed a grievance against Levitt.

Mr. Levitt became a plaintiff litigant when a student at CMU allegedly adopted Levitt's business and law firm persona in a fake Twitter account and began emanating a series of tweets that Levitt says were designed to defame, embarrass and harass.  This time last year, the complaint asserts, Levitt had 4500 followers [no easy feat] and was employed as an adjunct professor at CMU.

Last year, Levitt sued the CMU student but the defamation suit was tossed by the trial court and is now on appeal. We blogged about that case in this post.

Levitt has appealed the trial judge's order granting the tweeting student's motion for summary disposition on the basis that for over two months, the student's false Twitter persona gave no indication whatsoever that it was a parody and that the student intended to cause harm to Levitt's law practice through his micro-blog posts.

In the new case, Levitt is claiming that the local newspaper, Mt. Pleasant's Morning Sun, along with one of its reporters and the parent company, tortiously covered his battle with the Tweeting CMU student by intentionally [or recklessly] making misrepresentations about Levitt. Specifically, the complaint attacks one front-page headline that trumpets that Levitt made up a false award -Top College Lawyer- in order to enhance his electronic profile.

There are many many other examples set forth in the complaint. Fellow CMU business professors and adjunct instructors have a separate set of allegations reserved for their purported misdeeds.

We shall see where all of this goes; what a messy brawl.  If Levitt prevails in his tort case, it will definitely establish limits to what can be posted about a business on social media.

Meanwhile, Scribd, Volokh Conspiracy via the Washington Post, the ABA Journal, and even named defendant Morning Sun have all started following and reporting on this dispute as it involves the juicy intersection between social media and defamation. So stay tuned for updates and analysis as this case unfolds over the next few years.

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The United States, the United Kingdom, and now Spain make-up the short list of countries that have courts in which an accused is convicted and sentenced to jail for making a threat via Twitter.  In each of these cases, free speech over the Internet is pitted against law enforcement attempts to identify and contain terrorist threats.

In January, a Columbus, Ohio man was sentenced to 16-months in federal prison for violating the law against threatening to harm or kill the President by tweeting a series of death threats.  In the U.K, also in January, a pair of malicious female tweeters received jail sentences for tweeting vulgar threats from dozens of fake Twitter accounts to a feminist activist [who succeeded in getting Jane Austin's image placed on a Bank of England note].

In Spain, a 21-year old student, Alba Gonzales Camacho, was convicted for tweeting an invitation for the long-dormant terrorist group Grapo, to assassinate Spain's Prime Minister.  The Spanish constitution prohibits speech that glorifies terrorism.

Ms. Camacho's unfortunate reference to Grapo, the terrorist group active in the '70s and 80s, thought to be responsible for dozens of assassinations, remains a touchy subject in Spain ever since fascist dictator Francisco Franco's regime ended in 1975.  The young student's tweet was a call to arms for Grapo to shoot Spain's conservative Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy in the neck; she said in a series of tweets that she would tattoo the image of the Grapo assassin on her body.  

In sentencing her to a one year [suspended] jail term, the Spanish judge did not seem to care about Grapo's decades of inactivity.  Per the Spanish constitution, and similar to the Twitter threats that landed the Westerners in prison cells, the judge took the death threats against the country's leader very seriously.

These cases illustrate the enforceable limits on expressing your thoughts and ideas through the social media.  If your expressions constitute a terrorist threat, then you risk jail if the prosecutor can make a case.  

It is not surprising to us here at the Law Blogger that such cases have forced social media into the courthouse.  As with other forms of media, the limits of our free expression make for some great court cases.

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A few of my Facebook friends are judges.  They've taken a low profile on the news feed.  Will Michigan's Judicial Tenure Commission, formed in 1968 via constitutional amendment, seek to outlaw such social network connections like the State of Florida?

In Florida, the Supreme Court's Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee issued a 11/17/2009 decision, holding that judges may not connect with attorneys on Facebook, or similar social networking media.  The Committee's decision is based on a Florida's judicial canon prohibiting the appearance that a lawyer, or anyone else, is in a special position to influence the judge.

Floridian judges, however, remain free to post comments to their non-lawyer "friends", and can develop "fan pages" to help with their reelection campaigns.  Only the attorney-judge connection is now taboo in Florida.
The Ethics Advisory Committee stated that, "judges cannot isolate themselves entirely from the real world and cannot be expected to avoid all friendships outside of their judicial responsibilities, some restrictions upon a judge’s conduct are inherent in the office."


Ethics are catching-up slowly with attorneys and judges in the web 2.0 world.  Some states, like Louisiana, New York, and now Florida, have taken a restrictive view of lawyer's and judge's permissible activities on such sites.  


Linked-In, Twitter, and Facebook remain available to our judges.  You can expect Michigan's never shy Judicial Tenure Commission to address the situation as soon as the right case rolls around.  Shouldn't be too long... Stay tuned.


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