Law Student Sues Law School for Allowing Her To Enroll

Law student filing lawsuit isn't anything new. After all, they are studying to become lawyers.

But this one is a bit unique: Law student Morgan Crutchfield, a part-time student at Lincoln Memorial University's Duncan School of Law is suing the school for letting her enroll in it in the first place!

Crutchfield said in the suit she informed administrators at the law school immediately after learning she was lacking a foreign language requirement to graduate from Pennsylvania State University in 2009. Officials at Lincoln Memorial, however, told her it wouldn't be a problem so long as she completed her undergraduate degree before her final year of law school, according to the lawsuit.

Emails exchanged between Crutchfield and administrators over the last three years, outlining her academic requirements, are included in the court documents.

Last month, the state Board of Law Examiners informed Crutchfield that rules require her to have completed her undergraduate degree before beginning law school in order to sit for the state bar exam.

Over 2 1/2 years, Crutchfield has accumulated 54 course credits and nearly $80,000 in student loans at the Duncan School of Law, according to the suit.

Something tells me she will be a fine, fine lawyer one day: Link


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She has a point. Oh, maybe not an actionable point. But the school should have informed her that her degree would be worthless for the purposes of taking the bar exam.
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But if you go to the link and read the whole article. Duncan School of Law is not accredited by the American Bar Association. The ABA has just been allowing graduates to take the bar exam as a courtesy. So unless the school has been saying they are accredited, she should have done a little research of her own and known that she technically could not take the Bar Exam even if she graduated from Duncan.

Where does the responsibility of the student and the school become the deciding factor. Is it the responsibility of the school to make the student take the required courses to graduate. Or is it just the schools responsibility to tell the student these are the classes needed. Anyone who goes to college knows that you could easily spend the rest of your life taking classes and never actually graduate with a degree.
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I did read the whole article, and it states clearly that the school gave her inaccurate information. It was foolish for her to attend an unaccredited law school, but that unaccredited law school (intentionally or unintentionally) misled her.

She fell for an obvious scam, but that doesn't change the fact that she was scammed. There's plenty of blame to go around.
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@scotchdrnker - The ABA accreditation doesn't matter. According to the article, she was eligible to sit for the Tennessee state bar whether the ABA accredited the school or not. ABA accreditation only allows you to sit for OTHER state bars outside the state in which you graduate from law school. In this case, it is the state notifying her of the rule against sitting for the Tennessee bar without a Bachelor's. The ABA accreditation process is lengthy; any new school is likely to be unaccredited by the ABA for at least the first two years it is open and even after only provisional accreditation is granted until the first class takes bar examinations. Had she been eligible to sit for the state bar and if she intended to practice in Tennessee anyway, the decision to attend a new school wouldn't have been risky at all.
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