Judge Shuts Down Website

A U.S. District Court judge ordered Wikileaks.org, an institutional critique type of website, to shut down its site and not transfer its domain name to another host. Judge Jeffrey White, in an apparent gross misinterpration of the First Amendment and prior restraint law, infuriated many legal scholars, free speech activists and web site owners when he sided with a Cayman Islands bank, The Bank Julius Baer & Co. Judge White agreed with the bank that Wikileaks should be barred from posting corporate documents that clearly exhibit unethical behavior.

Commenting on this unprecedented ruling, David Arcadia, an Internet speech expert from Harvard Law, said that a court had never before ordered an entire Web site to shut down. “This is prior restraint in the most extreme fashion,” he concluded.

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