Trump's Lawyer Went to the Worst Law School in America
Michael Cohen’s alma mater has long been a punchline in the legal world.
By PHILIP SHENON May 04, 2018
The roster of the school’s graduates includes federal and state judges, two members of Congress and several high-profile courtroom lawyers and business leaders. But whatever the accomplishments of its most distinguished alumni, the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing, Michigan, once the largest law school in the U.S., does not have a reputation to match. And it never has.
Cooley may be, by some measurements, the worst law school in America. And its standing has not been enhanced by a flood of publicity about the quality of the legal work of its best known and, increasingly, most notorious alum: Michael D. Cohen, class of 1991, President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and the target of a federal criminal investigation in New York that has clearly rattled Trump.
The school is sensitive to the headlines: “In light of the current publicity about Mr. Michael Cohen, one of our graduates, it is disappointing to see all the gratuitous negative comments about our law school from people who know nothing about us,” the school’s general counsel, James Robb, said in an impassioned written statement to Politico. “What I am seeing is incivility and bullying by people who truly know little about legal education—and especially about our fine law school.”
Bullies, however, are not responsible for the troubling statistics that Cooley discloses to applicants on its own website.
The school accepts almost anyone who can pay the $51,000 annual tuition bill—more than 85 percent of its applicants were admitted last year. Fewer than half of its graduates manage to pass a bar exam on their first try; among all law school graduates in the country, about 75 percent pass on their first attempt. The 46-year-old school has had to go to court over the past year to fight for its accreditation from the American Bar Association, which found that the school was out of compliance on basic admission standards for a time. Last year, the National Advisory Council for Law School Transparency gave Cooley a ranking no school wants: It was No. 1 on the group’s list of “the 10 least selective law schools in the country.”
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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/05/04/trump-michael-cohen-lawyer-cooley-law-school-218318
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