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Court Dismisses Law Students’ Suit over Law School Job Data by Surajit Sen Sharma
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.
03/22/12
claims and misrepresentation in the U.S. can be dismissed with impunity. You can always prove
The judge, Manhattan
customers could have read and checked things
Supreme Court Justice Melvin
independently.
Schweitzer pointed out that the plaintiffs themselves admitted in the suit of “one of the grimmest legal job
The invocation of the centuries old property law
markets in decades.”
principle of caveat emptor (purchaser beware) seems dubious in the present case where the representation of
The dismissal reasoned, “In these new and troubling
academic prospects to students are concerned.
times, the reasonable consumer of legal education must realize that these omnipresent realities of the
In almost every instance the judgment turned the
market obviously trump any allegedly overly optimistic
reasoning of the plaintiffs and their standing against
claims in their law school’s marketing materials.”
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 seems a bit flimsy, though.
that NYLS’s true employment rate would be below the The dismissal admits the main issue without tackling
statistical mean of the bell curve,” the judge turned
it: Are law schools allowed to make “allegedly overly
that reasoning around and said that the low ranking
optimistic claims in their law school’s marketing
alleged by the students should have been sufficient
materials.”?
to tip them off that the school’s job data may be erroneous.
While Judge Schweitzer holds that the New York Law School’s marketing materials were not misleading under
Where the bench has such a mindset, it’s always better
the instant circumstances of the consumers being
not to allege too many facts but press that actions
college graduates capable of reviewing other sources of
had been taken upon ‘good faith.’ At least then ‘equity’
information, the dismissal does depend upon fresh legal
could have been brought into the picture without
reasoning that plaintiffs can be differentiated according
providing ammunition to the bench.
to their abilities of deciphering small print. The case is Alexandra Gomez-Jimenez et at v. New Now, if we were to apply and accept the reasoning in
York Law School, New York state Supreme Court, no.
the above paragraph – 99% lawsuits over fraudulent
652226/2011.
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