Today, the Court of Appeals, the highest court in New York, decided not to consider an appeal to the First Department’s affirmation of the New York Law School lawsuit. You may remember presiding Judge Schweitzer for saying that the nine class action plaintiffs were “sophisticated consumers” and that no reasonable consumer, let alone a sophisticated consumer, would believe the garbage employment statistics published by NYLS. Like many of the decisions that have dismissed the scam-suits, his opinion was filled with inaccurate information and bad math. His logic was not better. Basically, he stated that an egregious lie is more protected under the law than a subtle trick. In other words, the idea that NYLS was a respectable law school that actually produced practicing lawyers was so absurd that no one could believe it, especially a sophisticated consumer.
Just to recap that pretzel: the student is held to the high standard of a sophisticated consumer, and the law school is held to a standard lower than most penis enlargement advertisements.
Fortunately, the New Jersey lawsuit against Widener and lawsuits in California will be the first in a greater trend. More lawsuits will be filed, more discovery will reveal the greater frauds outside of just employment/salary scams, and the ship will continue to sink.
Of course, the judges in New York, at all levels of the judiciary, have expressed their simple desire to not be bothered with cleaning up their own profession. Perhaps Chief Judge Lippman feared that if the lawsuits could survive dismissal, his honorary degree from Pace might become worthless. Too bad he’s behind the curve: any degree from Pace or almost any other New York scam-factory is worthless.
By the way, I want to take this moment to emphasize that while the Republicans have their own blindness and spending messes, the law school scam is 100% limousine liberal invented. The unlimited federal loans funding this mess derive from the notion that the poor kids and minorities will benefit (yeah right, seen many black and latino students in the top 10% of T50)? The Vatican-level respect given to law schools by judges, many compensated as guest professors or internship coordinators, derives from their idea that these “institutions” help to develop knowledge, intellect, and moral direction.
It is a symptom of the typical generation gap, often discussed. These judges attended law schools when they really did offer to most graduates the opportunity to practice law and to move upward in careers toward powerful financial and policy positions and judgeships. These judges still live in a time when a 10-year gig at the public defender’s office was considered the last resort or the weird choice of a do-gooder. They do not understand the level of cutthroat competition, including Ivy-graduate applicants to public defender offices in obscure counties, and they do not realize that most current graduates will not be practicing law in 10 years and most will never repay their student debt.
The First Department, which wrote a toothless affirmation of the NYLS opinion, admitted that students were misled. However, they thought that our “noble profession” could deal with it through ethics complaints, not through the actual legal avenues available to people scammed by any other industry. The draw of judges on the deciding panel was apparently, by the legal team’s analysis, comprised of those on the liberal side of the spectrum of the New York judiciary.
That says a lot about that generation of judges when a liberal panel believes that the systematic use of misleading propaganda, used to scam young people out of millions, should not even progress into discovery to try to reveal whether the schools intentionally doctored the data in order to trick people.
I think that the real explanation behind all of this is simple. Many of these judges hail from the schools involved in the lawsuits or schools that would be next on the hit list. The lawsuits make the profession look even less credible, if that is possible, and it would be really embarrassing for the judge if their own school lost one of these lawsuits.
I guess our generation will have to change things. You know, because I am sure that in our brave new normal many Pace, Fordham, Cardozo, and Brooklyn Law School students will gain judgeships someday.
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