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Eric Muller has details.

Richard Peltz, a specialist in media and First Amendment law at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock, says he feels like a pariah after two students active in the school's Black Law Students Association made "false accusations of racism" about him. Civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate, often quoted on the subject of campus free speech, contends that even if Peltz is correctly characterizing the students' talk about him, a lawsuit is the wrong way to proceed. (Above the Law, Apr. 29; Michelle Hillen, "Experts watch as professor sues students", Arkansas Online, Apr. 27). More: Bainbridge, Althouse, Caron (rounding up links).

Well, at least it may help take some of the media spotlight away from Prof. Bernardine Dohrn. (Above the Law; Chicago Tribune; FoxNews.com).

It's done through the ABA accreditation process (Gail Heriot, "The ABA's 'Diversity' Diktat", Wall Street Journal, Apr. 28).

The old joke goes something like this: If you go to law school, graduate, sue the school for providing a poor education, represent yourself and then win the case ... did you really deserve to win?

The cases detailed here may not be quite as clear cut.

A group of students filed a $120 million class action against the American Justice School of Law in Paducah, Ky., on Nov. 17, citing allegations that include tax fraud, false representation to the American Bar Association, racketeering, scheming to defraud students and obstruction of justice. Rust v. American Justice School of Law, No. 5:07CV-191-R (W.D. Ky.).

Late last month, Adam Key, a second-year law student, sued Regent University School of Law, a private Christian school in Virginia Beach, Va., claiming violations of his right to free speech and religion after getting expelled for posting a critique in an online university forum. Key v. Regent University, No. 4:07-CV-04060 (S.D. Texas).

On Nov. 14, John Valente, a second-year student at University of Dayton School of Law in Ohio, filed a complaint against his school, citing negligence in dealing with exam software. Valente v. University of Dayton Law School of Law, No. 07-9593 (Montgomery Co., Ohio, Ct. C.P.).

It's far from being a trend (yet!), but shouldn't we expect a more costly legal education to generate demands from those students who slog it out to be chosen from an ever-increasing pool of applicants?

Law school tuition has been increasing at a considerable clip. And if you don't graduate, it doesn't matter to you if the value of the degree has risen twice as fast. You're not a lawyer. ("Don't Like Your Grade? Sue Your Law School," The National Law Journal, Dec. 18, 2007.)

Update: I'm not a lawyer, either.

(crossposted at catallaxy.net)

You may recall that a couple of Yale Law School students sued the administrator of a law-school bulletin board because they blamed silly gossip about them on the board for costing them job offers. (The administrator himself lost his job offer in response to the uproar.) If so, how come their Yale Law classmate Elizabeth Wurtzel—whose topless photos decorate the Internet, who wrote about her own cocaine and Ritalin addictions, and who was fired from a newspaper for plagiarism—was able to get a job offer from WilmerHale? More on Wurtzel: Taylor; Lat; Bonin, all talking about this NY Times piece. Previous skepticism about the lawsuit: Ilya Somin.

The College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007 [passed by Congress on Sept. 7] aims to help law students and other graduates with high debt through an income-based loan-repayment plan.

The market currently reflects a private-public pay gap reflecting the fact that public jobs are generally considered to have better working conditions and that private-sector law firms need to offer substantially higher pay to encourage attorneys to work there. If the government is providing thousands of dollars of loan subsidies to government and non-profit attorneys, the private sector will need to raise its salaries to continue to compete, some of which will be swallowed by the partners, but most will be swallowed by the clients, who, increasingly facing bet-the-company litigation, have inelastic demand for top law firms. Too, as attorney salaries increase, and loans are subsidized by the government, law schools will be empowered to extract some of that surplus by raising tuition. Winners: most attorneys, law school employees, and some clients of non-profits. Losers: taxpayers, clients, partners at non-top-tier firms.

Update: Discussion at Above the Law.

Laurie Lin reports on one way to cut down on lawsuits, being mooted in Wisconsin -- close down the University of Wisconsin's law school.

It is to laugh, no? And yet, considering that it is a publicly-funded institution, the "need" for more legal education, in a situation of glut, is a reasonable factor for the legislature that does the funding to consider, isn't it?

We'll agree: the posters at the AutoAdmit/Xoxohth board—like commenters on DailyKos, Google and Yahoo! boards, Legal Underground, The Volokh Conspiracy, and even Overlawyered—can be distasteful or obnoxious, and all the more so because in Xoxohth's case because the board is largely unmoderated. Posters have engaged in racial slurs and misogynist remarks; they are notorious for threads where posters evaluate the looks of female attorneys and law students. (Even my girlfriend was the subject of a brief thread.) The site has recently had negative publicity from a Yale Law student who blames a thread there for an inability to find a job and from a Boalt Law student who is facing expulsion because he briefly posted to AutoAdmit and quickly withdrew a poor-taste-joking threat of a Virginia-Tech-copycat at Hastings that resulted in the latter school being shut down for a day.

A Penn Law student who was an administrator on the site resigned in response to some of the shenanigans on the board in March. The WSJ Law Blog is reporting today that that was not enough for his future employer, Boston law firm Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge, which withdrew its job offer to Anthony Ciolli, who (to my knowledge) is not accused of making any objectionable remarks himself. Now, an employer can reasonably decide that it does not wish to associate with a controversial employee (though the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act imposes on private employment relationships in some circumstances what are in most other states thought of as constitutional speech and freedom-of-association protections applicable only to governmental relationships, which may mean that Ciolli has a cause of action against the firm).

But the decision of Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge to find Ciolli's association with the AutoAdmit board disqualifying is curious if only because one of the attorneys at the same office of the law firm has been indicted for felony homicide for allegedly killing a man in an auto accident while driving under the influence of sleeping pills. (Three and a half pills were missing from a three-hour-old Ambien prescription, and the attorney allegedly admits "tasting" them.) Now, that attorney is entitled to a presumption of innocence in his criminal trial (he pled not guilty in the summer of 2006, a motion to dismiss was denied later that year, and I cannot find any reference to the current status of his case). But if you ever wanted to know how damning it is in the modern legal community to be associated with a controversial website accused of misogyny, you now have an answer: it's worse than being accused of killing someone.

More blogosphere commentary: Concurring Opinions; Above the Law.

K.C. Johnson has assembled the details (Feb. 19) on the CNN/Court TV commentator's scurrilous handling of the lacrosse rape allegations. For more on Grace, see Mar. 1, 2006, as well as Legal Blog Watch, May 4, 2005, and Suz at Large, Mar. 2, 2006 (quoting Prof. Bainbridge's pungent assessment).

The legal professoriate does not escape unscathed from Johnson's attention, either. He is a particular critic (e.g., Jan. 21) of the televised pronouncements on the case of New England School of Law professor Wendy Murphy. And recent assertions by South Texas College of Law professor Kathleen A. Bergin on the Feminist Law Professors blog (Jan. 29, declaring the players "far from 'innocent'" whether or not a rape is proven in court) fail to stand up to critical scrutiny, Johnson says (Feb. 18). (More: Cernovich).

P.S. And here's the Saturday Night Live parody. Plus: Ambrogi, Bainbridge.

Turns out there was a law professor behind the idea (Jan. 22):

As for what sparked [Assemblywoman Sally] Lieber's decision to introduce a bill about spanking, it wasn't a rash of emergency room visits from 3-year-olds with sore bottoms. The San Jose Mercury News, which first reported the no-spanking story, wrote that Lieber "conceived the idea while chatting with a family friend and legal expert in children's issues worldwide." That friend was University of San Francisco Law School professor Thomas Nazario, who fiercely opposes corporal punishment. "It was my idea and I was primarily responsible for coming up with the final draft," he explains. (Which makes Lieber sound more like Nazario's pawn than a legislative leader, but I digress.)

(Eilene Zimmerman, "Spanking mad", Salon, Feb. 5). WryMouth (Jan. 29) has an account of Prof. Nazario's appearance on the popular Los Angeles radio show "John & Ken" to discuss the idea. Orange County Register columnist Steven Greenhut writes: "I don't advocate spanking as a rule, but it seems rather harsh to rip a child out of a happy home and put him in some nightmare foster-care scenario and put a parent in jail for doing something that has been widely practiced through the history of parenting." ("Lawmaker deserves a spanking", Jan. 28).

The Ann Arbor News covers Adrian Zachariasewycz's complaint against the University of Michigan Law School (see Jan. 27), and quotes me along the way:

In addition to seeking unspecified monetary damages, Zachariasewycz wants the law school to study his scores and provide a letter or make a verbal statement to prospective employers saying that his typing was a factor in his exams.

"I paid a lot of money to go to law school,'' Zachariasewycz said. "I interrupted my career. I worked very hard. And I got a big zero out of it.''

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank in New York City, is founder of overlawyered.com, which posted a comment about the case and other lawsuits Olson believes have "eyebrow-raising potential.''

"It's hard to figure out what's been done to him that's unlawful,'' Olson said.

Olson said he thought it first had something to do with rights of the disabled.

"But it looks like he's just an ordinary bad typist like a lot of the rest of us.''

(Jo Collins Mathis, "U-M law school sued over grad's poor typing skills", Ann Arbor News, Feb. 2).

According to Adrian Zachariasewycz, a/k/a Adrian Zack, of Woodlyn, Pa., some exams given at the University of Michigan Law School reward fast typists with a chance at higher scores. So he'll see school administrators in court, in a pro se lawsuit that also names as a defendant the Wilmington, Del. law firm of Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnell, where his associate's gig didn't work out. He's suing two of the law school's career counselors individually for alleged bad advice, too. (WSJ law blog, Jan. 26; complaint in PDF format). More: Feb. 5.

Thomas Joseph Bentey flunked out of St. Thomas University School of Law of Miami, and claims it was a conspiracy of the school to admit students it knew would flunk out, and wants his tuition and room and board back (as well as damages for lost wages and "embarrassment"). (The complaint also complains that Bentey's mother called the law school, but that it refused to review his C grade in Contracts II, and seeks an injunction for a review of the grade.) The attorneys seek class action status, which is frivolous on its face, because the individualized issue of whether a St. Thomas student flunked out because of their own underachieving would clearly predominate any group inquiry even if the conspiracy theory had any basis in rationality. One might also make some adverse inferences about Bentey's attorney, Michael Lombardi of Lombardi & Lombardi, for coming up with such a cockamamie theory of recovery that will only result in more embarrassment for his client, but he is a "Super Lawyer." Other defendants in the shotgun complaint include the ABA and the Department of Education, suggesting hopes for a number of nuisance settlements. (Bentey v. St. Thomas University School of Law, No. 2:06-cv-03463-PGS-RJH (D.N.J.); Leigh Jones, "Law School Sued for Expelling Students", National Law Journal, Sep. 1).

Update: Orin Kerr comments at the VC blog.

We've posted many times (Jul. 21, 2004, Mar. 24, 2006, etc.) on the subject of students who angle for extra time on exams through the use of debatable or borderline disability diagnoses, but Mike Cernovich has an anecdote from personal experience (Mar. 15) that should raise the level of alarm. P.S. Here's more from Boston, where 12 percent of students in the affluent suburb of Wayland are getting accommodations (Ron DePasquale, "More time for SATs a concern", Boston Globe, Jun. 1).

Cathy Young:

This also brings to mind a comment I heard at a 1992 academic feminist conference at Radcliffe College. One [of] the panelists, Stanford Law School professor Deborah Rhode, pointed out that white men constitute only 8% of world's population and added, to great mirth and delight from the audience, "That's a very encouraging fact." Because, of course, all those non-white men around the world are so much friendlier to women's rights.

Cathy retells the anecdote here with trivially different wording and a 1993 National Review article by Stephanie Gutmann, "Are all men rapists?", includes the following: "The [65-page] committee report [on the Violence Against Women Act] cites a book by Stanford law professor Deborah Rhode, who recently announced at a conference that 'white men make up only 8 per cent of the world population. I find that such an encouraging fact.'"

Overruling a trial judge, the Fourth Circuit has ruled that Carin Constantine can sue the George Mason University Law School in northern Virginia as well as professor Nelson Lund (whose work we've cited favorably in the past) over alleged failure to accommodate her disability, in this case severe migraine headaches which led to attendance problems and to an "F" on an exam. Her suit also charges that the university retaliated against her for voicing complaints, chilling her exercise of First Amendment rights. (Jerry Markon, Washington Post, Jun. 15).