Back in the 1990s, lawyer and author Philip K. Howard wrote a bestselling, critically acclaimed book with a great title: The Death of Common Sense (affiliate link). The book’s themes remain relevant today. If you want to know where common sense goes to die, visit an American law school.

Today’s tale of silliness comes from the Earle Mack Thomas R. Kline School of Law at Drexel University in Philadelphia. We’ve been hearing rumblings about it — e.g., on Twitter — for a few days, and we recently got our hands on the full story (including the relevant documents). A tipster told us:

Professor Lisa McElroy frequently uses TWEN to update assignments and such, and this was sent [out on Tuesday, March 31] with an erroneous link. The posting was for her first-year Legal Methods writing class. The porn hub link is legit. She cancelled her afternoon upper-level classes.

Oy. That sure as heck ain’t a “great article on writing briefs.” We aren’t going to link to the Pornhub video, but if you want to locate it, type “SHE LOVES HER ANAL BEADS” into Google. Apparently students are referring to the scandal as “Beadgate.”

And that’s where it should have ended — with students having a harmless chuckle at a legal-writing professor’s expense, and maybe cracking a few jokes about how “SHE LOVES HER ANAL BEADS — AND HER BLUEBOOK, TOO.”

But this being legal academia, of course a mountain had to be made out of a molehill. Dean of Students Kevin Oates sent this email to the student body shortly after Professor McElroy’s bead blooper:

And that’s not all, according to our Drexel source:

Professor McElroy was placed on leave pending an investigation, required by Section 9 of Drexel’s Sexual Harassment and Misconduct Policy. One of the deans has taken over her teaching duties.

A professor placed on leave, and getting subjected to an investigation, simply because she accidentally shared “SHE LOVES HER ANAL BEADS” with a bunch of (grown-ass) law students? People haven’t freaked out so much over a bunch of beads since the Dutch bought Manhattan.

We reached out to Professor McElroy and to Drexel for comment. Professor McElroy didn’t respond (and we don’t blame her), but a university spokesperson sent us this statement:

Drexel has been made aware of the email that a professor sent to her class of law students that erroneously included a link to inappropriate material. The University takes all matters of this nature seriously and investigates them in accordance with our standard policies and procedures.

So yes, Drexel really is “investigating” Professor McElroy over this hill of beads beans. It sounds exactly like what critics of legal education say about going to law school: a colossal waste of time and resources.

Let’s stop bead-ing around the bush — sorry, I couldn’t help myself — and look at this from a practical perspective. Professor McElroy didn’t intend to “harass” anyone. She intended to send out a link to some resource about legal writing, as you can tell from the intro line of her TWEN posting, but accidentally sent along the wrong link.

That could have happened in two ways. First, she might have gotten hacked by a pornography company. Porn purveyors will resort to all sorts of shenanigans to promote their products, and people do get hacked, Anthony Weiner notwithstanding (just ask Sony). If she got hacked, then she’s the victim here, not the perpetrator, and no investigation is warranted (except perhaps an investigation into whoever hacked her).

Second, she might have made a copy/paste error. Maybe she had Pornhub open in one tab of her browser and a legal-writing website open in a different tab. She copied the Pornhub link instead of the intended link, hit “send,” and realized her mistake after it was too late. And now her students know that “law professors are just like us” — they watch online porn. That’s not exactly news; we’ve written before about randy law professors.

Here at Above the Law, we spend a ridiculous amount of our day copying and pasting — so when I read about this tale, I thought to myself, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Let’s say I meant to paste in a link to www.SEAmless.com, in a story about law firm policies on what time you can charge dinner to the client, and due to my browser’s auto-suggest accidentally pasted in a link to www.SEAncody.com (whatever Sean Cody might be). Embarrassing for me? Sure. Requiring an “investigation”? Don’t be absurd.

I raised these points with a Drexel Law source, who shared these thoughts:

I don’t believe that she intended to harass anyone, not this time anyway. I wouldn’t want to be on that investigatory panel, though. An investigation, however unnecessary, will obviously include a search of her computer and Internet history, to see if she was hacked. Who wants to see what kind of porn their co-workers are watching? Although the email message was consistent with what she would otherwise email to her students, especially given this was sent to a writing class, so it is unlikely that she was hacked. But it begs the question – should she consume more coffee before sending emails containing links at 5 a.m.? How does a law professor, who is bred to be detail-oriented, not notice a link that says “pornhub.com” in it? A simple proofreading scan would yield notice of that error, no?

The tipster then shared some allegations about Profesor McElroy being not very nice to her students. One can’t help wondering whether the schadenfreude surrounding “Beadgate” reflects student antipathy towards a less-than-popular professor, whether “tough” women professors get a bad rap, and whether students would have tattled to the administration about a more well-liked member of the faculty.

This Sunday is Easter, so we should view the controversy surrounding Professor McElroy in a forgiving light. We all have our private vices — assuming that porn is even a “vice” (I submit that it’s not) — and we all make mistakes.

Let he who is without sin cast the first anal bead.

UPDATE (4/6/2015, 12:30 p.m.): Some interesting points raised in the comments:

1. Certain computer worms, often triggered by visiting porn sites, can take over your computer and send links to porn to people in your email contacts. Professor McElroy might not have visited any such sites herself; other people might have had access to the computer used for sending the offending TWEN posting. (The TWEN posting went out around 5 a.m., so she might have been at home and on a home computer at the time.)

2. Professor McElroy is no dummy. She’s a graduate of Dartmouth College (1989) and Harvard Law School (1995), and she appeared on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire in January 2010. Alas, she didn’t make it past the $12,500 question. (We’ve posted the video footage on the next page.)

UPDATE (4/6/2015, 3:00 p.m.): Here’s additional coverage from Inside Higher Ed. A university spokesperson confirmed the existence of an investigation but did not answer an inquiry about whether Professor McElroy has been suspended.

UPDATE (4/6/2015, 4:00 p.m.): The story has been picked up by Total Frat Move: “If you’re going to spit shine the diamond box, you better be all in. You can’t casually pop back and forth from anal bead videos to emailing ‘interesting’ articles about writing briefs. This is the age old mistake of mixing business with pleasure. Always play it safe, bang it out, and be overwhelmed with guilt afterwards like the rest of us.”

UPDATE (4/7/2015, 6:40 p.m.): Congratulations, Professor McElroy, you’ve made the pages of Gawker. And Happy Place / Someecards too.

UPDATE (4/7/2015, 7:30 p.m.): The story is now in the New York Post, which has a different (and somewhat more defensive) statement from Drexel: “Drexel is required to initiate fact-finding for all reports of inappropriate behaviors of a sexual nature that may impact members of our community.”

UPDATE (4/7/2015, 7:45 p.m.): Here’s the full version of the statement, via BuzzFeed:

Drexel has been made aware of an email that a professor sent to a class of law students and erroneously included a link to inappropriate material. According to federal law and the University’s policies and procedures, Drexel is required to initiate fact-finding for all reports of inappropriate behaviors of a sexual nature that may impact members of our community. As part of these policies and procedures, an employee may be put on administrative leave — which is not punitive — during the investigation.

UPDATE (4/8/2015, 4:00 p.m.): The story is now on the Huffington Post, where Jason Linkins expressed agreement with my view that the university overreacted, and on the Daily Mail, which pulled up additional personal tidbits about Professor McElroy. The Daily Mail notes that she is 50 years old, a married mother of two, a self-described “Supreme Court junkie,” and “an accomplished author with a number of published biographies and children’s books.”

UPDATE (4/12/2015, 8:00 a.m.): Was Drexel required to investigate this incident under Title IX? For a discussion of these issues, see here and here.

UPDATE (4/27/2015, 5:30 a.m.): Professor McElroy just addressed this incident in a Washington Post op-ed.

(Flip to the next page for video footage of Professor McElroy on “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.”)