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News on law schools updated
RICHARD WEINER
Legal News Reporter
Published: August 10, 2012
As law schools look to open their fall semesters in the next few weeks, we would like to update several of the stories that we have been following concerning legal education, bar exams and law school litigation about false law school statistics.
First, Arizona has become the latest, and sixth, state to administer the multistate Uniform Bar Examination (UBE) to prospective lawyers. The UBE is currently adopted by 10 states: Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Utah and Washington.
Administered by the National Conference of Bar Examiners, the UBE aims to create a true, one-size-fits-all national bar exam. Currently those 10 states accept each other’s UBE results for admission to that state’s bar.
The UBE is given over two days and is composed of the Multistate Essay Examination (MEE), two Multistate Performance Test (MPT) tasks and the Multistate Bar Examination (MBE). It is uniformly administered, graded and scored by user jurisdictions and results in a portable score.
Next, the University of Illinois School of Law has just been fined $250,000 for falsifying applicants’ test scores in reporting data to the American Bar Association. That kind of data helps determine how a law school is ranked in the U.S. News and World Report rankings. Numerous schools have been accused of falsifying these and other records, like employment records, but Illinois is the first school to be fined by the ABA for such behavior.
Illinois’ deception was a deliberate part of the school’s effort to get into the Top 20 of law schools in those rankings.
As a side note, there are currently no specific policies within the ABA that spell out penalties for such behavior—sort of like the NCAA. But where would our society be without non-governmental governing bodies that just make up their own self-contradictory rules as they go?
Up next are more pieces of the ongoing saga of the litigation around the Thomas M. Cooley School of Law. Cooley, located in Michigan and the largest law school by student population in the country, was one of the first law schools to be sued by disgruntled graduates over their published graduate employment statistics.
Well, that case will now have to be fought in appellate court, as the trial court in Michigan just dismissed the case against the law school. This ruling follows on the heels of a similar case that was dismissed against New York Law School in March. That decision is being appealed, but plaintiffs are now 0-for-2 in these cases.
There are 12 other law schools in litigation in similar causes of action, all of which fundamentally state that law schools misstated or left out negative employment information on their websites, and that these students were fraudulently induced to go to those schools because of that.
The Cooley judge flatly rejected the fraud claims, using language similar to the judge in the New York Law case who essentially held that kids who are smart enough to get into law school should know better than to just rely on those kinds of statistics. The court also dismissed on other grounds that are based on Michigan law.
In another part of this litigation, one of the original Cooley plaintiffs’ attorneys has filed a countersuit against Cooley for defamation. Jeff Kurzon filed his suit in New York claiming that he was defamed by public comments that the Cooley’s president Don LeDuc had made about him while the litigation was pending.
And, finally, attorney Donald Dobkin has once again sued the University of Iowa College of Law for age discrimination in hiring, and other things, as the school has refused to hire him to its faculty.
Dobkin, 59, has already lost an age discrimination trial against the school which he sued in 2009. He had gone through the interview process but the job was offered to someone considerably younger. A jury didn’t buy it.
But Dobkin now claims that newly-discovered evidence contains documents that show that, in 2010, the school had rated a younger candidate higher on its hiring list and offered him an interview, even though that younger candidate’s scores were considerably inferior to Dobkin’s scores. The fact that Dobkin had sued the school before apparently also showed up on committee notes. So he has hauled them back to court again seeking a faculty position and back pay.