After Golden Gate announced its closure, disgruntled students and alumni sued for an injunction requiring the über-toilet to continue its operations. Unsurprisingly, they lost. Golden Gate is part of law-school-scam history.
As for the various claims arising from alleged breach of contract, "plaintiffs are unlikely to prevail on any of them" (at 3). Not exactly a ringing endorsement from the bench.
With this decision, Golden Gate is the sixteenth ABA-accredited law school to close since 2016:
Cooley (one campus)
Hamline (merged with Mitchell)
Indiana Tech
Whittier
Charlotte
Savannah
Valpo
Arizona Summit
Cooley (a second campus)
Thomas Jefferson (relinquished ABA accreditation in favor of state accreditation)
La Verne (relinquished ABA accreditation in favor of state accreditation)
Concordia
Cooley (a third campus)
Florida Coastal
Penn State Law (probably)
Golden Gate
Which law school will be the next to close?
Hard to believe there was a time there were enough lemmings to support FIVE+ Cooley campuses. Anyone ever meet someone from the FL campus? Always a mystery how it is doing while the MI alums are easily found.
ReplyDeleteCooley also tried to open a campus in Kalamazoo. That never went very far. I was beginning to wonder whether it was going to litter the Upper Peninsula with branches of its franchise…
DeleteI can't claim to know much about the campus in Florida. It's a weird outpost of a Michigander-dominated chain. Yet it has outlived 3½ of the campuses in Michigan, so it must be sufficiently lucrative for the time being.
A decade or so ago, Cooley had almost 2000 students in all campuses combined. The three InfiLaw über-toilets were almost as big; all three are long gone, as is InfiLaw itself.
One law school failing is a step in the right direction. Realistically, the US needs 40-50 to supply the entire country. Defund the bottom one hundred to start cleaning house. All the lazy boomer law professors getting paid 200k-400k a year to do nothing need to go along with the lemmings bankrupting themselves when they are just going to fail the bar exam.
ReplyDeleteCooley graduate here. I graduated way back in the 1990's as a first generation law student in my family. Nobody in my family even went beyond high school. So nobody could tell me the risks and I had no network on the legal industry. And there were no scam blogs back then to warn about the risks of law school either. You figured if it's ABA approved you eventually will find legal employment.
ReplyDeleteWas I dead wrong. Biggest mistake of my life. Never found employment so just let my law license lapse since it's not worth paying for continuing education to keep the law license.
Had to actually sell cars at a car dealership and most salesmen only have a high school diploma.
A sad story. It is understandable that you, with no background in law and nobody to advise you (Old Guy was in the same boat), would end up at Cooley. Thirty years later, however, there is no excuse for anyone to attend that horrible über-toilet.
DeleteAnd you did better than the many Cooleyites who are expelled or fail to pass any bar exam.
LOL I find it hilarious that these plaintiff students (and the alumni association for some reason) tried to not only sue on breach of contract, but demand specific performance (which is the part that'd keep the school open). The court didn't see any likelihood of success on the breach of contract claim and so it didn't need to much reach the specific performance issue, but even if they had, I don't see how the plaintiffs wouldn't have had an adequate remedy at law (money damages).
ReplyDeleteThat is also a remedy that prevents harm to your classmates. For example, should any of your classmates be wise enough to turn down the teachout entirely, they get a closed school discharge of all their loans. Do these people have any idea how many toilet grads would kill for a mulligan like that? Or how awful it'd be to deprive ALL the students of that mulligan via a court order forcibly "unclosing" the school?
Heck, if you're that dead-set on finishing you can just apply to other schools on your own and see how much transfer credit they'll give. So long as it's not under the formal teachout plan, you can get a discharge. https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/forgiveness-cancellation/closed-school.
The claim of specific performance was downright laughable. As you said, these ridiculous plaintiffs sought to compel the über-toilet to go on operating so that they could finish their worthless degrees. They can't even make out a breach, still less an unusual remedy.
DeleteYou're quite right: if arguendo there had been a loss, the remedy would have been compensation for transferring to some other law school. Any number of über-toilets would have taken them. When Arizona Summit went tits up, the U of North Dakota offered admission to every single Summitoid, and many accepted the offer. Wouldn't Appalachian or Ohio Northern. to name but two, be tickled pink to soak up dozens of people locked out of Golden Gate?
You're also right to observe that transferring after this ill-advised venture would be foolish. If these people had any sense, they would leap at the opportunity to get out of their student loans. Yet they're trying to force their wretched über-toilet to stay open for their sake!
And why was the alumni association involved in this? Just to avoid the disgrace of representing the graduates of a defunct institution? How can this be any of the alumni association's business?
I wonder if they do graduate from their teach out program if they should get a discount in tuition because the law school being closed soon afterwards the career service office will be non-existent and the tuition money was paying for that service they are not receiving?
DeleteThat would surprise me. Being trapped by their own stupidity, they have little negotiating power. Also, lemmings don't show an inclination to shop around—probably because they are spending other people's money, not their own. Thus we find über-toilets that charge about as much as Harvard and Yale.
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