<p>The elements of a defamation suit; whether slander or libel, are:</p>
<ul>
<li>A defamatory statement;
** Published to a third party;</li>
<li>Which the speaker knew or should have known was false;
** That causes injury to the subject of the communication</li>
</ul>
<p>Wouldn’t a CORRECT appraisal of a student de facto insulate a LOR writer from a defamation lawsuit because the plaintiff could never establish that the writer relied on FALSE facts.</p>
<p>Besides the legal issues, you also get into a letters ‘arms race’. If you know that your competitors are exaggerating the qualities of their good but not great students, then you feel compelled to do the same, to make things ‘fair’.</p>
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<p>Well, sure, there are always a few crazy people out there. But the lawsuit you cite was over a grade, not a letter of recommendation. By cobrat’s logic, professors should therefore also refuse to give any grade lower than an A, because such grades might give rise to lawsuits by disgruntled crazy people. Yet I just don’t see that happening. </p>
<p>Even at Brown or Dartmouth where the average grade is an A-, the grade that gave rise to the defamation lawsuit in QuantMech’s anecdote.</p>
<p>You can’t live your life worrying about whether something you do might cause some crazy person to file a meritless lawsuit against you. If you did, you couldn’t do anything. And someone might sue you for that.</p>
<p>A student who does very well in a course as a sophomore may not need a letter of recommendation (LOR) until she is a senior, by which time the professor’s recollections of her will have faded and the professor may no longer be at the school. She could ask for an LOR at the end of her course, but it would be time-consuming for professors to write generic letters of recommendation that may never be needed. I wonder what bclintonk or other professors suggest.</p>
<p>Beliavsky,</p>
<p>If a student is really good, professors tend to remember them. I once received an email from a student that started “you may not remember me; I was in your class 10 years ago.” My stomach turned, but I read on, and I remembered that particular student vividly. I wrote a great letter, emphasizing that I remembered the student a decade later.</p>
<p>I usually turn down students who I can’t rave about because of the inflated nature of LOR, but I wrote a good letter for a C student once. He said no one else knew him very well, and I knew his C was because of his job.</p>
<p>I think I would refuse to write a generic letter because it would be pretty meaningless and obviously outdated in the race for graduate school and jobs. I do ask students to provide me with their letters of application, resume, personal statements to facilitate my letter writing and to help them revise and strengthen their supporting documents.</p>