A law graduate has been given a ten-year restraining order after he subjected a lecturer to a barrage of abusive emails because they once knocked into each other on campus.

While he was a second year student at Hull University in 2012, Luke Harker bumped into commercial law professor Christian Twigg-Flesner in a corridor. Scarborough magistrates court heard that Harker's resentment that the lecturer had not moved out of his way "built up" in the subsequent years, until in September 2014 it became too much and he fired off a series of emails to the professor. In them, Harker called Twigg-Flesner a “greedy negroid Jew” (despite the fact that his victim was neither black nor Jewish), and wrote, “I would love to throw you on your head and break your glasses”.

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Twigg-Flesner said he was "stunned" when he realised that the emails were not a hoax, and that as he was taking the blood-thinning drug Warfarin at the time, "any blow to the head could be potentially fatal". The court heard that although Harker was known for boasting about his intellect, he was caught almost immediately because he sent the emails from his registered university account. It also emerged that he was cautioned in 2014 for harassing a female student.

In mitigation, Harker's solicitor blamed the episode on his client's frustration at being unable to find a job in law. Harker admitted a charge of racial aggravated harassment without violence and was ordered to pay Twigg-Flesner £200 compensation. He was also given a suspended 18 month jail sentence and 150 hours of community service, and banned from contacting the lecturer or visiting the Hull campus for a decade.