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The website’s thirty-person staff would thus be incapable of vetting the thirty million notices posted monthly.

The opinion posited that Craigslist, like common carriers such as telephone services, does not create the discriminatory content it carries and would have enormous difficulty screening notices. Judge Easterbrook distinguished between newspapers, against which the Fair Housing Act is routinely applies, and Craigslist. Although the provision exempts single-family houses rented by an owner with no more than three such houses, many of these notices were for apartments and condominiums falling outside the single-family exemption. A consortium of Chicago law firms sued Craigslist for hosting notices on the website that indicated preferences against minorities and people with children. § 3604(a), prohibits the publishing of advertisements that indicates discrimination based on race and other prohibited classes. In 2001, Joel Michael Schwarz contributed a JOLT article about liability for third party postings in the context of practicing law over the Internet.Ī section of the Fair Housing Act, 42 U.S.C. Randy Picker of the University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog sees the ruling as yet another reason newspapers are dying in the competition against less-strictly-regulated online competitors. Howard Bashman of How Appealing provides additional links, as well as coverage on the en banc rehearing of a similar case, Fair Housing Council v. The opinion by Chief Judge Easterbrook clarified the potential liability of an online service: as Craigslist was not a “speaker” of the illegal information, it was not liable as a publisher.Įric Goldman of Technology and Marketing Law Blog analyzes Judge Easterbrook’s reasoning as part of 47 USC 230 Week. On March 14, the Seventh Circuit affirmed summary judgment by the District Court for the Northern District of Illinois for Craigslist, holding that the online bulletin board did not violate the Fair Housing Act by providing “an electronic meeting place” that hosted, among many other things, illegally discriminatory housing advertisements. Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Inc.