TACIT MISREPRESENTATION BY STUDENT DURING ADMISSIONS PROCESS ENTITLED LAW SCHOOL TO REFUSE TO AWARD LLM DEGREE AFTER STUDENT HAD COMPLETED COURSE REQUIREMENTS.
The First Department, in a full-fledged opinion by Justice Saxe, determined respondent law school had the authority to refuse an LLM degree to a student who had completed the course requirements because of the student's (tacit) misrepresentation at the time of admission to the program. The LLM program was open to students with a law degree from a foreign school. However, the student's law degree was from an online law school—information the student should have provided when he realized the school representative was under the impression his degree was from a foreign school. The student's law school transcript was not provided until after he had begun courses in the LLM program:
With regard to the contract cause of action, petitioner relies on case law holding that “[t]here exists an implied contract between the institution and its students such that if the student complies with the terms prescribed by the institution, he will obtain the degree which he sought” … . However, even assuming that such an implied contract might have been formed here, a school has the authority to rescind a student's admission or to dismiss a student from the school, even after course work has begun or been completed, where there were material misrepresentations or omissions in the student's application … . … Although petitioner here did not affirmatively or explicitly misrepresent facts on his application, he omitted the critical fact that the school from which he had received his J.D. degree was not a foreign law school, which fact disqualified him from eligibility for entry into the LL.M. program. By submitting the application, petitioner was implicitly stating that he satisfied the program's prerequisites for attendance, in particular, the requirement that he had attended a foreign law school. Indeed, he did more than omit that information; he allowed respondents to proceed with his admission knowing that they harbored a misconception regarding the nature of the institution that had awarded him a J.D. degree. Petitioner knew or should have known from the outset that (1) to be eligible for the program to which he applied, he had to have graduated from a foreign law school, and (2) on the date he was admitted, Touro's administrators had incorrectly concluded that Novus was a law school located in the Philippines. Since petitioner's admission was based upon an omission of a material fact of which petitioner was aware, petitioner's conditional admission was falsely obtained. Pursuant to the school's code of conduct, the terms of the application and the law the school had no contractual obligation to award a degree under these circumstances. Matter of Salvador v Touro Coll., 2016 NY Slip Op 01924, 1st Dept 3-17-16
EDUCATION-SHCOOL LAW (TACIT MISREPRESENTATIONS BY STUDENT DURING ADMISSIONS PROCESS ENTITLED LAW SCHOOL TO REFUSE TO AWARD LLM DEGREE AFTER STUDENT HAD COMPLETED COURSE REQUIREMENTS)/CONTRACT LAW (EDUCATION-SCHOOL LAW, TACIT MISREPRESENTATIONS BY STUDENT DURING ADMISSIONS PROCESS ENTITLED LAW SCHOOL TO REFUSE TO AWARD LLM DEGREE AFTER STUDENT HAD COMPLETED COURSE REQUIREMENTS)