It didn’t take long for Judge Melvin Schweitzer to decide whether New York Law School had deceived its former students. Last August nine recent grads sued NYLS, claiming that the school had misled them by advertising inflated postgraduate employment statistics — and then left them saddled with huge amounts of debt and scant job prospects. On March 22, just ten days after hearing oral arguments on NYLS’s motion to dismiss, the New York state court judge threw out the proposed class action, ruling in essence that if someone is smart enough to go to law school, they’re smart enough to know that they can’t rely only on what a school says about itself.
But while Schweitzer stopped the suit against NYLS for the moment, he didn’t squash the larger debate in the legal profession about the merits of the student’s claims. This debate continues in large part due to the suits filed against NYLS and 13 other law schools by David Anziska and two other Manhattan-based solo practitioners, Jesse Strauss and Frank Raimond. The trio of young, media-savvy lawyers say that the schools aren’t just luring students into their classrooms by manipulating employment stats — they’re committing fraud.
