Western Michigan University Cooley Law School is an American Bar Association accredited law school. WMU-Cooley has four campuses. Its main campus is in Lansing, Michigan and its satellite campuses are in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Auburn Hills, Michigan, and Tampa, Florida. First year courses may be taken at Western Michigan University's Kalamazoo campus.
An affiliation between Cooley and Western Michigan University went into effect on August 13, 2014.
According to Cooley's ABA required disclosures, only 27.4% of graduates from the class of 2015 obtained full-time, long term, bar passage required employment 9 months after graduation. 23.8% of graduates were unemployed 9 months after graduation. Only 51.86% of graduates managed to pass a state bar exam in 2015, a requirement to practice law.
History
The law school is named in honor of Thomas McIntyre Cooley (1824-1898, served 1864-1885), who was a prominent 19th-century jurist, 25th justice and Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. Cooley was also a dean of the University of Michigan Law School and visiting faculty at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Thomas E. Brennan, also a former Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, led a group of lawyers and judges in establishing the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in 1972, which is now affiliated with the Western Michigan University with classes on each of its four campuses.
On July 28, 2014, the ABA and The Higher Learning Commission gave their approval to the affiliation between Cooley and Western Michigan University.
On August 13, 2014, the affiliation became official and included Cooley changing its name from "Thomas M. Cooley Law School" to "Western Michigan University Cooley Law School."
Curriculum
Cooley prepares its graduates for entry into the legal profession. While most students work toward a Juris Doctor degree (J.D.), Cooley also offers the Master of Laws (LL.M.) degree as well as joint degrees in Master of Business Administration (J.D./M.B.A.) and Master of Public Administration (J.D./M.P.A.). (The J.D/M.B.A. is offered in partnership with Oakland University; the J.D./M.P.A. is offered in partnership with Western Michigan University.)
Degree types
Cooley awards the following types of degrees:
- J.D.
- J.D./M.P.A.
- J.D./M.B.A.
- J.D./LL.M.
- LL.M. - Corporate Law and Finance
- LL.M. - Homeland and National Security Law
- LL.M. - Insurance Law
- LL.M. - Intellectual Property
- LL.M. - Self-Directed
- LL.M. - Tax
- LL.M. - U.S. Legal Studies for Foreign Attorneys
Concentrations
J.D. students are able to select from several concentrations (specialized areas of legal study):
- General Practice
- Litigation
- Business Transactions
- Administrative Law
- International Law
- Environmental Law
- Constitutional Law and Civil Rights
- Taxation
- Intellectual Property
- Canadian Practice
- Focused Studies
Legal study outside the United States
Cooley operates programs allowing ABA-approved foreign study credit in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In addition, students are able to study at ABA-approved programs through partner law schools, including U.S. law schools operating programs in: London, England (University of Notre Dame); Oxford, England (Florida State University); Madrid, Spain (College of William and Mary); Montreal and Quebec, Canada (Pennsylvania State University); and Paris, France and Muenster, Germany.
Accreditation
Cooley has been accredited by the American Bar Association since 1975 and by The Higher Learning Commission since 2001.
Clinical programs
Cooley offers clinical programs at each campus. Students who participate in any of the Michigan clinics are allowed to practice law in Michigan under the Michigan Court Rules by representing clients in court, drafting client documents, and giving legal advice under the supervision of faculty. The Innocence Project is nationally recognized in the United States for helping free persons wrongfully incarcerated by obtaining DNA evidence and providing pro bono legal advocacy to overturn their convictions. Cooley also offers an elder law clinic, Sixty Plus, Inc., which provides free legal services to senior citizens, as well as two Public Defender's clinics, which allow students to work in the Public Defender’s office with indigent clients who are accused of committing a crime. The Access to Justice Clinic provides a general civil practice, focusing on family and consumer law. Free legal help in family law and domestic violence matters is offered at the Family Legal Assistance Project. Evening and weekend students can gain experience in the Estate Planning Clinics or the Public Sector Law Project, which provides civil legal services of a transactional, advisory, legislative or systemic nature to governments.
Cooley offers externships throughout the United States at over 2600 approved externship sites. Student externs work under the supervision of experienced attorneys, with the guidance of full-time faculty.
Cooley is currently the Executive Office of Scribes: The American Society of Legal Writers.
Libraries
Cooley has a library at each of its five campuses. Legal research can be conducted at the libraries through a variety of media, including print, electronic, and multimedia sources. Reference librarians are present at each campus. The libraries have a total of about 60 staff. CoolCat is the online library catalog. The Cooley libraries collectively house roughly 670,000 volumes with an annual growth rate of more than 17,000 volumes. Cooley Law has a reciprocal agreement with both Western Michigan University and Oakland University allowing access to the materials in each institution's collections.
Motto
Cooley's Latin motto, In corde hominum est anima legis, was written in the 1970s by its founder, former Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas E. Brennan. Dean Brennan had originally described the meaning as "the spirit of the law is in the heart of man"; when a female organization called the Cooley Action Team argued that the motto should also refer to "the hearts of women", Justice Brennan agreed and changed it to "The spirit of the law is in the human heart".
Costs
The total cost of attendance (indicating the cost of tuition, fees, and living expenses) at Cooley for the 2013-2014 academic year is $63,772. Law School Transparency estimated the debt-financed cost of attendance for three years to be $258,232.
Bar passage
Cooley graduates have struggled to pass state bar exams, a requirement to practice law. In recent years, the average school bar passage rate has been about 50%. The average school bar passage rate was 51.86% in 2015, 52.73% in 2014, and 51.45% in 2013. Cooley's bar passage rates have averaged about 20% less than the state average pass rates.
Ranking and reputation
In 2006, Cooley received the E. Smythe Gambrell Professionalism Award from the American Bar Association Standing Committee on Professionalism for the law school's "Creating a Culture of Professionalism in Law School" program.
The 2007 publication "Best Colleges for African Americans" listed Cooley as the third best law school for African Americans behind Texas Southern School of Law and Howard University and just ahead of Georgetown and Harvard.
During the 2015-2016 application cycle, Cooley admitted 85.8% of applicants. The entering fall 2016 class had a median GPA of 2.90 and median LSAT of 141 (15th percentile of test takers). The 25th percentile GPA of enrolled students was 2.60 and the 25th percentile LSAT of enrolled students was 138 (9th percentile of test takers). Law professor David Frakt described Cooley's 2015 entering class as "statistically the worst entering class of law students in the history of American legal education at an ABA-Accredited law school."
In 2012, Cooley was noted, by a plaintiff's attorney in a civil lawsuit regarding false advertising, for having "the loosest admissions standards of any accredited or provisionally accredited American law school... the employment prospects of its graduates are grim, even compared to the generally dire state of the legal job market." In 2013, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the district court's dismissal of the plaintiff's lawsuit because although the graduates’ complaint showed that the statistics on which they relied was objectively untrue, their reliance on the statistics was unreasonable. Judge Quist noted that "it would be unreasonable for Plaintiffs to rely on two bare-bones statistics in deciding to attend a bottom-tier law school with the lowest admission standards in the country."
In 2017, Cooley was sanctioned by the American Bar Association's Section of Legal Education and Admissions due to its lax admissions standards.
According to Law School Transparency, Cooley is considered one of the most at-risk law schools for exploiting students for tuition.
Post-graduation employment
According to data provided by Thomas M. Cooley Law School to the American Bar Association (ABA), Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, for purposes of adhering to accreditation standards set forth by the ABA, 23.8% of graduates from the class of 2015 were unemployed 9 months after graduation. Only 27.4% of graduates obtained full-time, long term, bar passage required employment. 5% of graduates worked in non-professional jobs. 10.1% of graduates worked in part-time jobs.
Only 311 out of 1079 (28.8%) 2012 graduates obtained full-time, long term positions requiring bar admission (i.e., jobs as lawyers), 9 months after graduation. According to Cooley's official 2013 ABA-required disclosures, 22.9% of the Class of 2013 obtained full-time, long-term, JD-required employment nine months after graduation. Cooley's Law School Transparency under-employment score is 46%, indicating the percentage of the Class of 2013 unemployed, pursuing an additional degree, or working in a non-professional, short-term, or part-time job nine months after graduation.
Additionally, 215 of the 311 (69.1%) were employed in firms consisting of one to ten lawyers, 44 were employed as solo practitioners, and 171 were employed in firms of two to ten lawyers. A total of 13 graduates (1.2%) had found employment in firms of more than 100 lawyers, and two graduates (0.2%) had secured federal judicial clerkships.
Branch campuses and ABA accreditation
In 2002, when Cooley was expanding, Cooley filed a lawsuit against the American Bar Association for delaying the accreditation of its satellite campuses in Grand Rapids and Auburn Hills. Cooley was working to gain ABA accreditation since the satellite schools opened in June 2002, but had faced delays caused by disagreements on standards, resolved by a settlement of Cooley's lawsuit with the ABA, resulting in the ABA's acquiescence.
In May 2012, Cooley opened a new branch campus in Riverview, Florida, in the Tampa Bay region.
After suffering a 35% decline in enrollment across its five campuses between 2012 and 2013, Cooley announced on July 2, 2014, that it would not be enrolling first year students on its Ann Arbor campus for the Michaelmas term in 2014, but that current and transfer students could continue their studies at that campus. The announcement also called for cuts in faculty and staff. On October 3, after having outlined a transition plan in June, Cooley announced the Ann Arbor campus would permanently cease operations on December 31, 2014.
Since the Michaelmas term in 2015, Cooley has offered first year classes at Western Michigan University's Kalamazoo campus.
Ranking and Judging the Law Schools
Cooley is shown as "Rank Not Published" in the U.S. News & World Report listing of law schools. Cooley is ranked second in the twelfth edition of Judging the Law Schools, which is published by Cooley.
Cooley relies heavily on its library statistics in its own Judging the Law School rankings. Specifically, Cooley has 10 library-based statistics in its 2010 rankings, which included separate entries for the total square footage in the library, the seats available in the library, the amount of hours the library is open, the total number of volumes in the library, the total number of titles in the library, the number of librarians, the total hours that staff works in the library, and several other library-based criteria. Cooley has been subject to intense criticism and backlash for assigning equal value of these library-based statistics to far more important factors such as bar passage rate and percentage of graduates employed following graduation.
Defamation lawsuit by Cooley
In July 2011, Cooley filed a defamation lawsuit against the law firm Kurzon Strauss, LLP and four anonymous bloggers after they claimed the school was inflating its post-graduation employment statistics and was under federal investigation for its student loan default rate. The firm retracted the statements, but maintained the school used "'Enron-style' accounting techniques" to manipulate their jobs-placement data. In September 2013, U.S. District Judge Robert J. Jonker dismissed the lawsuit, stating that Cooley was a limited purpose public figure and did not provide adequate evidence the defendants acted with actual malice. The court further noted "the statement that 'Cooley grossly inflates its graduates' reported mean salaries' may not merely be protected hyperbole, but actually substantially true."
Class action against Cooley
In August 2011, a class-action lawsuit by 12 Cooley graduates was filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan, alleging fraud and misrepresentation about Cooley's published employment information concerning its graduates. The school responded by filing a motion to dismiss. On July 20, 2012, Judge Gordon Jay Quist granted the motion, concluding: "The bottom line is that the statistics provided by Cooley and other law schools in a format required by the ABA were so vague and incomplete as to be meaningless and could not reasonably be relied upon. But, as put in the phrase we lawyers learn early in law schoolâ€"caveat emptor." The judge further noted that "it [was] unreasonable for Plaintiffs to rely on two bare-bones statistics" in deciding to attend Cooley as it is "widely accepted that American law schools, Cooley included, employ all sorts of legerdemain to boost employment rates in a contracting legal market."
Faculty and staff layoffs
In August 2014, Associate Dean James Robb announced that Cooley had begun laying off faculty and staff at all its campuses. A JD Journal article claims that the layoffs will exceed 50%, but James Robb denied this claim. Cooley had experienced a drop in enrollment of over 40% in recent years and had raised tuition by 9 percent.
Notable faculty
- Thomas E. Brennan - Founder of Cooley Law School; former Chief Justice Michigan Supreme Court
- Spencer Abraham â€" former United States Senator and United States Secretary of Energy
- Robert Holmes Bell â€" District Judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan
- John Warner Fitzgerald â€" former Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court (deceased)
- Philip J. Prygoski â€" constitutional law expert and author, American Law Institute member
- John W. Reed - University of Michigan grad; Fellow of the International Society of Barristers
- James L. Ryan - judge on the United States Court of Appeals of the Sixth Circuit; member of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta; US Navy Reserve, Captain, Retired
- James Cooper Morton - Lecturer of Evidence and Advanced Evidence
- Justin Brooks - criminal defense attorney; Lecturer on Criminal Law and Death Penalty Law
- John N. Scott â€" author of Evidence Illustrated: Cases to Illustrate How All the Rules Work
- Joseph Kimble â€" author of Lifting the Fog of Legalese: Essays on Plain Language, named by the Burton Awards for Legal Achievement as a drafting consultant for the rewritten Federal Rules of Civil Procedure
- Stuart Dunnings III (Former) - 19 years as the prosecutor for Ingham County, Michigan; First African-American to be elected to such office in Michigan.
Notable alumni
- John Engler â€" former Governor of Michigan; Chairman of Blackford Capital's Michigan Prosperity Fund
- Chris Chocola â€" former Representative from Indiana's 2nd congressional district
- Bart Stupak â€" former Representative from Michigan's 1st congressional district; lobbyist with Venable LLP
- Michael D. Cohen â€" Executive Vice President of The Trump Organization and co-president of Trump Entertainment
- Edward Mermelstein â€" New York City attorney and real estate developer; specializes in international clients especially from the former Soviet Union
- Kamal Nawash - principal in Nawash Law Firm, Washington, DC. Regular commentator on CNN, Fox, BBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, and radio stations.
- Jon Cooper â€" head coach of the Tampa Bay Lightning
- Diane Dietz - University of Michigan All-American in basketball; Big 10 Conference Chief Communication Officer
- Tedd Nesbit - Pennsylvania Representative for the 8th District; graduate of Florida State University
- Todd Courser - former Michigan Representative from the 82nd District
- Anthony H. Gair â€" New York City attorney who represented the family of Amadou Diallo in a case against the New York City Police Department
- Mark Grisanti â€" Buffalo, New York New York State Senator, 60th District; as of 2015, Acting NY Supreme Court Judge
- Andrew Farmer - Tennessee Representative for the 17th District
- Alan Cropsey - Member of Michigan Senate and House of Representatives; Defender of Freedom Award from the NRA
- Kevin Cotter - Michigan Representative for the 99th District; Speaker of the House 2015-16
- Chris Hazel â€" Louisiana House of Representative for 27th District since 2008
- Jane Markey - Judge, Michigan Court of Appeals, Third District
- Benjamin F. Gibson - federal judge; Chief Judge of US District Court Western District of Michigan; Private in U.S. Army
- Iqra Khalid â€" Canadian Member of Parliament since 2015; also B.A. from York University, Canada
- Ruby Sahota - Canadian Member of Parliament; Honours degree from McMaster University, Canada
- Hiroe Makiyama - House of Councillors of the National Diet of Japan
- Joseph Lagana â€" New Jersey General Assemblyman; grad Fordham University, NY
- Charles Macheers â€" Kansas Representative for the 39th district.
- Ruby Sahota - Canadian Member of Parliament since 2015
- Nicholas Scutari- New Jersey State Senate; nephew of Donato Scutari, of the Italian Communist Party and Senator of the Italian Republic
- Rashida Tlaib â€" Michigan Representative from the 6th District; second Arab-American woman elected to a state legislature
- Paul Hillegonds - former Michigan Representatives for the 88th District; Director of Government Relations for DTE Energy
- Jeff Kurzon - New York City attorney; graduate of McGill University, Canada and Aix-Marseille University, France
- Terry Bankert - Politician; former City of Flint Ombudsman and lawyer.
- Edward Gaffney - Michigan State Representative from Grosse Pointe Farms; Director of the Michigan Center for Truck Safety
- Jim Howell (politician) - Michigan House of Representatives who represented a portion of Saginaw County; Attorney for Dow Chemical from 1981-1983,
References
External links
- Western Michigan University Cooley Law School website