Graduate kept from becoming a lawyer because of enormous student loans

Readers of this site know well that debt for law school ruins many lives. But how many of us know that student loans can keep a person from becoming a lawyer at all?

Fifty-nine-year-old Cynthia Marie Rodgers got a JD from toilet law school Capital last May but was kept out of the bar for reasons of character and fitness. A panel of the Supreme Court of Ohio reached this conclusion for two reasons. The more colorful reason, which is also the first one cited, is her history of commencing dozens of lawsuits, many of them apparently frivolous if not vexatious, without knowing what she was doing. She committed the most rudimentary procedural errors and appears to have been pretty consistently unsuccessful. She seemed not to regret what the court found to be abuses of the legal system.

But the court invoked another reason: "Outstanding Debts" (pages 7–9). Allow me to quote the court (pages 8–9):

The applicant and her husband have amassed almost $900,000 in student loan debt. Although the applicant expressed that she does not have any idea how much she has borrowed, it appears that her share of this amount is about $340,000. The applicant testified that she and her husband consolidated their loans and that they are on a "percentage of income" plan, "so we'll just always pay a percentage of our income for the rest of our lives." The applicant explained the percentage of income plan as a 25 year plan, and after 25 years any remaining amount is forgiven, although it may become taxable income.

The applicant did not know what the percentage of her income was that she would be required to pay under the percentage of income plan, but "right now it's zero because of my income being so low. Once your income hits $20,000 then payments start kicking in." The applicant stated that her husband is not paying any money on the loan now either because he is "semi-retired" and "filing for disability." The applicant had no idea how much she borrowed to attend law school, or the total amount of her student loan debt. She stated that she is disabled … and is not able to work a forty-hour week. The applicant stated that "if they are willing to have me on that payment plan, then if I win the lottery then they get it. Once I became disabled * * * I knew there was no way for twenty years that I would ever be able to pay all that back." The applicant indicated that if she becomes a lawyer she intends to work part-time for legal aid.

Further (page 11):

She has openly neglected financial responsibilities, and knowingly incurred a substantial amount of student loan debt that she admits will probably never be repaid.…

The conduct described above represents an ongoing lack of integrity, abuse of process and neglect of financial responsibility.

Ms. Rodgers is eligible to try again in 2024, when she will be 64 years old. Evidently the public will be stung for about a million dollars for the sake of university education that Ms. Rodgers and her husband seem unlikely ever to use. Insouciant even of the amount of her debt or of the monthly payments, and reportedly marked with bad credit for unpaid debts that ended up being written off, she was nonetheless allowed to rack up more than a third of a million dollars in student loans.

At least the court has declined to admit to the legal profession someone so unconcerned about laws, obligations, and the interests of others. And it has labeled the accumulation of unpayable debt, including student loans, as "neglect of financial responsibility" sufficient to keep one out of the bar. How many more people with mountains of student loans will find themselves excluded from the legal profession for similar reasons?

Blaxploitation: Tuskegee University hosts law-school fair

Tuskegee University, a historically Black university located in rural Alabama, is hosting its third law-school fair later this month. Ninety law schools, nearly half of those accredited by the ABA, will send representatives to meet prospective students.

The list features mostly toilets and über-toilets. Not a single school in Tier 0, 1, or 2 will be present: no Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Columbia, NYU, or Stanford. The only representatives of Tier 3 will be Michigan, Northwestern, and Penn; even Duke and Virginia, the only two law schools in the entire South that are worth attending, will not be there. Various trap schools and crap schools from Tier 4 plan to attend. The rest of the group will be from Tiers 5 and 6, both near (Faulkner, Samford, Elon) and far (Texas Southern, the two John Marshalls, UMass Dartmouth). Oddly enough, Cooley is not on the list, despite incessantly trumpeting its racial diversity.

Since only three of the ninety schools are worth attending even in principle (and it must be said that one of them, Northwestern, is sliding towards Tier 4), this fair does a disservice to its largely Black target audience. It frames the other 87 schools as respectable establishments that hold out promise to Black people, when in fact they are very poor choices for anyone without money, connections, or both—which includes the bulk of the Black people to whom Tuskegee is marketing the law-school scam.

Disingenously, "Dr. Tammy Laughlin, assistant professor of political science, noted that the annual fair has become an integral part of efforts to support Tuskegee students’ admission to a wide variety of state, regional and Ivy League law schools"—when the only Ivy League institution attending this event is Penn, not exactly what comes to mind when people think of the Ivy League. (Since the Ivy League is an athletic conference of undergraduate institutions, "Ivy League law schools" is not a meaningful category anyway.) This fair drives Tuskegee students into life-destroying indebtedness for the sake of a decidedly inferior law degree that will serve them poorly when they look for work.

Booker T. Washington, the first president of what was to become Tuskegee University, is widely remembered as an Uncle Tom for his role in the contemptible Atlanta Compromise. Against the advice of many other Black leaders of his day, he advocated that Black people submit to Jim Crow—"the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly"—and gradually convince their white "friends" of their worth through the excellence of their industrial and agricultural labor. However well meant, this law-school fair continues Washington's shabby legacy of subjugating Black people to white interests—in this case, those of the mostly white law-school scamsters who would fatten themselves by saddling Black people with impossible debt and false hopes of advancement through the overcrowded and declining legal profession.

"Punitive Standards"

I had to read this two or three times to make sure I was getting this correct:

In what is being described as a “stunning” decision, a bankruptcy judge has ruled that a 2004 graduate of Yeshiva University’s Cardozo Law School may erase more than $220,000 in student loan debt.

The law grad, 46-year-old Kevin Jared Rosenberg, represented himself. His annual income is less than $38,000, and his monthly income after expenses runs at a deficit of about $1,500, according to the Jan. 7 opinion by Chief U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Cecelia Morris of the Southern District of New York.

I was going to go into a long quip-filled tirade about how "I felt a great disturbance in the Scam, as if millions of bootstrapping-Boomers cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced," but considering the Chief Judge is a Boomer herself, maybe I'll just keep quiet on that part and move on...

Wow, do I feel for Rosenberg, and I wish him well.  Looking at his statistics - 2004 graduate, 46 years old - I'm seeing some real kinship there in similar numbers.  Another nontrad who was lured by the pipe dreams of the law school cartel.  Another nontrad for whom the the law school dream fell squarely flat, to say nothing of the K-JD variety.

Morris said she was applying the so-called Brunner test for discharge of student debt as it was originally intended. Since the test was created in a 1987 decision, cases interpreting it have set out “punitive standards” and “retributive dicta,” she said. Those harsh cases “have become a quasi-standard of mythic proportions, so much so that most people (bankruptcy professionals, as well as lay individuals) believe it impossible to discharge student loans,” she said.

“This court will not participate in perpetuating these myths.”

Amazing.  It's almost as if the ridiculous and completely unsustainable costs of undergrad and graduate school are finally applying enough pressure to the system that rational people can see the gross disparity between the treatment of student debt and literally all other kinds of debt.  When people can't buy homes, pay their bills, buy things, or start families, all for having the temerity of wanting to improve themselves and their standing, it's a real drag on the economy, man.  Why it took 40+ years to recognize this out is beyond me, but that gush of sweet, sweet federal loan money was probably too distracting for self-interested parties.    

Granted, there will be loan sharks and other holier-than-thou haters that will go into apoplexy over this development.  The case is on appeal, so no doubt the full force of these parties will be brought to bear against this decision standing.  Last thing anyone deserves is an actual jubilee, especially one of those lawyer-types.  You know they all drive solid-gold Bentleys and have seven vacation homes anyway.  Speaking of which, I need to sue somebody, get one of those lawyers on the phone...

Here's hoping this not only opens the door to reasonableness for many, many victims of the scam, but also is a small beginning in the entire financial rethinking of how education is handled in this country.  Wouldn't that be horrible.      

http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/law-grad-wins-discharge-of-his-student-debt-in-opinion-criticizing-punitive-standards?utm_source=salesforce_157309&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekly_email&utm_medium=email&utm_source=salesforce_157309&sc_sid=04723111&utm_campaign=&promo=&utm_content=&additional4=&additional5=&sfmc_j=157309&sfmc_s=81419318&sfmc_l=1527&sfmc_jb=353&sfmc_mid=100027443&sfmc_u=5415587

The fake-lawyer scam

You could gain admission to Stanford, pay a fortune, graduate with a degree in law, pass the bar exam, pay for a license, and try to find a job.

Or you could just lie.

Robert Sinclair Argyle of West Bountiful, Utah, reportedly favored the latter approach. He managed to get a job at a law firm on the strength of false claims to hold a JD from Stanford and a license to practice in both Utah and California. He was caught and fired soon enough, but right away he landed a job paying a cool $175k plus benefits. There he "worked for a short time and was terminated when a background investigation revealed the defendant lacked verifiable legal education and law experience". Now he and his wife face multiple criminal charges related to these and other incidents.

But suppose that instead you went to now-defunct Valpo, and even graduated, but kept failing the bar exam. Should that be an obstacle to your legal career?

Why, not if you are Kelcie Miller. She lied her way into a job as a lawyer at the public defender's office in Madison County, Illinois; she even produced a forged document to substantiate her bogus license. Only when a court reporter checked the spelling of her name, and a judge tried to look it up in the directory, was she exposed. On Friday she pleaded guilty to a single count of false impersonation of an attorney. Sentence: 30 months' probation, plus restitution of $40,232 (apparently for salary fraudulently obtained). She happens to have a few more charges related to passing bad checks. In the meantime, the real lawyers of the public defender's office have had to review the cases on which Miller had illegally acted.

Miller was lucky to get off so lightly. I'm surprised that she didn't spend time in jail for that.

Suppose, however, that you had never gone beyond community college but really wanted to be a lawyer. You could, of course, go for a bachelor's degree and then a law degree, pay for both, pass the bar exam, and try to find work.

But Kimberly Kitchen had a better plan: lying through her ass. She held herself out as having graduated at the top of the class from Duquesne's law school and then having taught law at Columbia. She passed a number of forged documents to lend color to her false claim to being a lawyer. She practiced law for ten years, even becoming partner of a firm and head of the county's bar association, before being caught. She was convicted of various charges and sentenced to jail.

Kitchen's lawyer called her "incredibly competent" and presented a number of clients who testified to their satisfaction with her services. Plainly Kitchen was not competent, incredibly or otherwise, to practice law. The satisfaction of the clients has nothing to do with that. Indeed, it is astounding that a (presumably) licensed lawyer could call a fraud like her competent, thereby degrading the whole legal profession.

Well, Ms. Incredibly Competent appealed against the sentence on the grounds that she had been "a good fake lawyer" and that no fraud occurred, since no one suffered any damage. How her counsel could seriously present that argument is beyond me. Can anyone suppose that her clients and the firm, never mind the legal profession and even Duquesne, lost nothing? The losses go well beyond the obvious ones, such as fees paid. At one firm where I worked, when I found out that a lawyer who had left almost a year earlier had mishandled two matters in the same way, I called for every one of his files and reviewed them all myself. That took a great deal of time (and, yes, I found other errors of the same sort that I had to correct). What if I had found out that a non-lawyer had had carriage of matters for years? Someone would have had to examine all of those matters. And what if serious errors had come to light? The firm would have been fully liable for any losses. As the court pointed out here, the insurer would not have covered them.

About twenty years ago, there was a spate of exposés of "degrees" from diploma mills. Loads of people in exalted positions turned out to have bought a "degree" in this way. On top of that, many people—including the dean of admissions at MIT, who had the unmitigated gall to lecture the public on the importance of honesty and integrity—turned out to have fabricated degrees outright. Yet scamsters are still getting away with this sort of fraud. As long as the sham of credentialism lasts, Old Guy can only recommend verifying credentials aggressively.