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Poetic Justice?
Thanks to our “progressive” law schools, we live in the age of the class-action lawsuit. But, as they say, what goes around comes around – and I read that Anna Alaburda, a 2008 honors graduate of the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego who has had some difficulty in finding employment as a lawyer, has initiated a class action law-suit against her alma mater, charging that it has engaged in “fraudulent and deceptive business practices,” including “a practice of misrepresenting its post-graduation employment statistics,” and that “the disservice TJSL is doing to its students and society generally is readily apparent.”
I know nothing with regard to the accuracy of Ms. Alaburda’s claims. But it has been widely reported that, in seeking to attract students, law schools all over the country have misrepresented the likelihood that their graduates will find employment as lawyers, and, of course, these same law schools have assiduously trained their students in how to make a living from corporate folly of the very same sort.
Sit back, pour yourself a Scotch, and consider the possibilities.
Published in General
Aren’t there exceptions to this one?
It is a lovely irony. Still, I think the heart of the problem is similar to the problem with medical schools: the government shifts the demand curve by making massive student loans available.
The other day I ran into a friend who’s a recent law school grad working full time as a lawyer. He was behind the counter at our local Starbucks. The family needs the extra money, so he took an evening job. People grossly underestimate the impact that student loan debt will have on them in the future. Meanwhile the universities are making out like bandits, and they know that they can make a fortune, particularly from law schools. Every time you turn around, there seems to be a new law school starting up.
One has to wonder if the lawyers are really progressives, or if they’re just greedy people taking advantage of a ridiculous legal system.
I’m not going to venture a guess as to how this class action is going to play out (especially a class action in a California state court), but I will say this: anyone with enough horsepower in their skull to complete three years of ABA-approved legal instruction and pass the California bar is certainly capable of an independent (and rudimentary) risk/reward analysis about the wisdom of shelling out six figures to a relatively new law school in hopes of landing a lucrative position during one of the tightest legal job markets in recent memory.
I forgot to mention that the lawsuit is for $50 million. A nice piece of change, if you can lay your hands on it.
The same sort of suits could also be filed against most of today’s liberal arts undergraduate schools (Hillsdale College, of course, excepted). The irony is that the complainants would have to employ law school graduates to file the suits.
My bet is that liberal arts colleges do not make extravagant claims about the job prospects of their graduates. Business schools, on the other hand, . . . .
The latest news is that Thomas Jefferson Law School is blaming it all on the reporting standards established by the American Bar Association. Perhaps Ms. Alaburda, who has $150,000 in student loans to pay off, will want to make the ABA a co-defendant. Here is the complaint.
I don’t know about that. I suspect that extravagant claims about future employment are implicit in the liberal arts colleges’ extravagant tuition charges. But then, I’ve recently finished reading “Crazy U” and have a freshly cynical view of the higher education industry.
I’ve always said we need civilian oversight of the lawyer-government complex.
Funny. I was just reading Captain Capitalism on this very topic, courtesy of Small Dead Animals. Who knew that you could calculate a p/e ratio for a degree?
That’s nothing. You can also calculate one for a Congressional seat.
I hate to be a spoiler here, but I think that Dr. Rahe’s disgust with media reports of ridiculous class action verdicts has led him to assume that the class action mechanism itself is irremediably flawed, and that every claimant is frivolous. I doubt that this is the case.
While class action lawsuits can be abused, there are situations in which they may be appropriate (although the case that he mentions is clearly not one of them). Still, I think that it is hasty to assume that class actions per se are a bad idea, as Dr. Rahe seems to think. Whatever their defects, the whole point of the mechanism is to allow plaintiffs whose individual claims are too small to justify hiring a lawyer on their own to aggregate their claims in order to get the compensation which they feel is due to them. Is it the conservative position to assume a priori that every class member is a dishonest creep, and that every defendant is always in the right? I’d hate to think so. On the other hand, if our position is that the mechanism is irremediably flawed, then what should we replace it with?
I do not know what the conservative position on class action suits is. I do know that a lot of them are frivolous and that venue-shopping allows them to be quite effective. Generally, the plaintiffs get next to nothing and the lawyers make truly fabulous sums. For the most part, it is a shakedown operation, and it is the principal reason why we need tort reform.
No broad generalization is universally true, but where I live we see advertisements on TV constantly in search of claimants to join lawsuits. Did you take Yaz? Did you have a pacemaker? Did you have a hip replaced? It appears to me that pretty much any drug that has ANY unwanted side effects will eventually be the target of a rapacious legal team. Add to that, that the class is full of people who have not been harmed in any way and it does look like the process wide open to abuse. I would not say irredeemably flawed yet but it looks bad where I am at.
Cheers
Indeed. What investor doesn’t get the occaisional letter in the mail announcing a class action lawsuit against a corporation on behalf of stockholders? I routinely toss them in the can. Why would I participate in the looting of a corporation for a handful of nickels?
That is what I do as well.
I was recently included in a class action lawsuit by default just by having purchased a particular product. That I should have to actively disallow some lawyer from adding my name to a list of claimants or otherwise be a party to a lawsuit I had no part in initiating speaks poorly of our tort system, to say the least.
According to John Stossel in Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity, you may be a claimant in around 7 class-action lawsuits right now, without your knowledge or permission.
I say the following as a lawyer who loves practicing law. We need to close half the law schools in the country. We could probably reopen some as medical schools and do society an even greater favor.
That’s a pretty broad generalization, don’t you think?
Wakka wakka wakka!