Court Dismisses Law Students’ Suit over Law School Job Data

03/22/12

The proposed $200 million class-action suit brought against New York Law School, by a group of law students accusing the school of luring students with misleading job data, has been dismissed by the Manhattan Supreme Court. While the students and their attorneys have expressed intentions of appeal, the judgment dismissing the suit exhibited a line of rationale turning the statements of the plaintiffs against them.


The judge, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Melvin Schweitzer pointed out that the plaintiffs themselves admitted in the suit of “one of the grimmest legal job markets in decades.”

The dismissal reasoned, “In these new and troubling times, the reasonable consumer of legal education must realize that these omnipresent realities of the market obviously trump any allegedly overly optimistic claims in their law school's marketing materials.”

That seems a bit flimsy, though.

The dismissal admits the main issue without tackling it: Are law schools allowed to make “allegedly overly optimistic claims in their law school's marketing materials.”?

While Judge Schweitzer holds that the New York Law School's marketing materials were not misleading under the instant circumstances of the consumers being college graduates capable of reviewing other sources of information, the dismissal does depend upon fresh legal reasoning that plaintiffs can be differentiated according to their abilities of deciphering small print.

Now, if we were to apply and accept the reasoning in the above paragraph – 99% lawsuits over fraudulent claims and misrepresentation in the U.S. can be dismissed with impunity. You can always prove customers could have read and checked things independently.

The invocation of the centuries old property law principle of caveat emptor (purchaser beware) seems dubious in the present case where the representation of academic prospects to students are concerned.

In almost every instance the judgment turned the reasoning of the plaintiffs and their standing against their own selves: While the plaint alleges that according to the U.S. News & World Report, NYLS was in the bottom tier of law schools, and “logic dictates that NYLS's true employment rate would be below the statistical mean of the bell curve,” the judge turned that reasoning around and said that the low ranking alleged by the students should have been sufficient to tip them off that the school's job data may be erroneous.

Where the bench has such a mindset, it's always better not to allege too many facts but press that actions had been taken upon ‘good faith.' At least then ‘equity' could have been brought into the picture without providing ammunition to the bench.

The case is Alexandra Gomez-Jimenez et at v. New York Law School, New York state Supreme Court, no. 652226/2011.