[aothman]

Touretzky is also one of scientology's biggest online critics:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Secrets/

I believe CMU's lawyers are well-acquainted with responding to legal threats against him.

[blantonl]

CMU's lawyers most certainly had to vet this before it went up publicly, so lets raise a toast to those attorneys, and most importantly Touretzky, for their efforts.

This was not a spur of the moment thing - these guys did their homework.

"Ding"

[scott_s]

CMU's lawyers most certainly had to vet this before it went up publicly

I doubt that. Academics are used to operating with autonomy, and by nature don't confer with lawyers before speaking. So I'm curious why you're so certain he presented this to the lawyers first.

[jhferris3]

As someone who's taken a few classes with said professor, I highly doubt he consulted any lawyers before doing this.

[state_machine]

From my experience at CMU, I'd say that isn't likely:

The administration is very cautious and conservative most of the time, and if they had been involved, this would have,at the very least, taken weeks to happen.

That said, the CS department head may have given him a thumbs up (probably even literally), knowing that legal will be forced to back them up, if he asked anyone at all before hand.

[JoeAltmaier]

I sincerely doubt that. It would be essentially identical to SONY vetting a professor's online posts/research results.