12 More Law Schools Sued for Defrauding Their Students; Many More Class-Action Lawsuits Expected

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a team of eight law firms have just “sued a dozen more law schools across the country, accusing them of luring students with inflated job-placement and salary statistics and leaving graduates ‘burdened with debt and with limited job prospects.’ The lawyers . . . said they planned to file 20 to 25 new lawsuits every few months . . . the lawsuits had been filed on behalf of a total of 51 graduates, and each suit was seeking class-action status. The targets of the latest round of lawsuits” include  “Brooklyn Law School,” “Chicago-Kent College of Law,” “DePaul University College of Law,” “Golden Gate University School of Law,” “Hofstra Law School,” “University of San Francisco School of Law,” “Widener University School of Law,” and several others. As the Chronicle notes, “Disgruntled law-school graduates who can’t find jobs are increasingly taking their complaints to court, asserting that the schools duped them into enrolling with misleading statistics about their chances of landing well-paying jobs when they get out. Last year similar lawsuits were filed against New York Law School, Thomas M. Cooley Law School, and Thomas Jefferson School of Law.”

As I noted earlier, much of what law schools teach their students is useless drivel, and law schools routinely exaggerate their students’ job prospects. Accordingly, there is no reason to require people to attend law school before sitting for the bar exam. As law professor Paul Campos notes, legal education is often a rip-off, since the typical law professor has little real-world experience practicing law, and “knows nothing about being a lawyer.” But since most states require people to attend law school before sitting for the bar exam, law schools have been able to increase tuition by nearly 1,000 percent since 1960 in real terms. For its part, the Obama Education Department has implemented policies that encourage colleges to jack up tuition and charge students even more, even as college students are learning less and less.