We’ve blogged quite a bit on this site about the pernicious effects of growing law student debt loads (see, e.g., here, here, here and here.) In case you missed it, there was a story in the New York Times that provides a cautionary tale on the subject, but I am not quite sure what the moral of the story is.
The piece involves a gentleman denied admission to the New York bar after amassing $400,000 in student debt. (Note to our newer lawyer readers: And you thought you had it bad!) To be fair, his debt load on graduation was somewhere in the order of $270,000 (which includes undergrad, a JD and LLM). It took him a few tries to pass the bar exam, and he was in an accident that laid him up for a while. He never made his payments on the loans, so Sallie Mae transferred a bunch of them to collection agencies that were only too hapy to tack on the fees and penalties that brought the balance up to $400,000. (Of course, the would-be lawyer contests any number of Sallie Mae’s actions and the way the loan balance skyrocketed so quickly.)
Apparently moved by this gentleman’s hard-luck life story (which included a history of foster homes, battling back from a major accident, etc., etc.), the Committee on Character and Fitness was ready to admit him to the New York bar despite the loan dispute. But a five-judge panel thought otherwise, and overruled the committee.
“Applicant has not made any substantial payments on the loans,” the judges wrote. “Applicant has not presently established the character and general fitness requisite for an attorney and counselor-at-law.”
He plans to fight this determination, of course. And the aspiring lawyer, 47, quite optimistically believes that once he gets his law license, he will be able to earn enough to pay off his loan balance (presumably once he’s done tangling with Sallie Mae, which he plans to sue).
It’s an interesting story, and I’d suggest you read the entire NYT article. The point to ponder is whether this gentleman did anything that would make him unfit or lacking the character to practice law.
Did he do anything demonstrating that he was unfit to practice law? On the one hand, he made a series of extremely poor choices by borrowing $270,000 simply to go to school. There are many ways to earn advanced degrees, few of which carry a $270,000 price tag. If exercising poor judgment makes a person “unfit” to practice law, then yes, perhaps he did. On the other hand, there is a double-standard. As the NYT article explains, it is much more difficult to be admitted to the bar than to follow the rules once admitted. One commentator (Judge Schiltz) wrote, “the formal rules represent nothing more than ‘the lowest common denominator of conduct that a highly self-interested group will tolerate.’ Many of the sleaziest lawyers you will encounter will be absolutely scrupulous in their compliance with the formal rules.”
In a way, it offends one’s sense of logic and justice that this person could not be admitted to practice law while those discussed in the NYT article were only temporarily suspended.