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February 2018 - School’s Out

by Richard W. Millar, Jr.

School can be difficult, if for no other reason than the ages we go to school are difficult ages. If we could live life backwards, many of us would probably do better in school than we did, although the benefits would be subject to the law of rapidly diminishing returns.

I am sure that many of us have experienced poor teachers from time to time. I am equally certain that the obverse is true and many of our (or at least my) teachers would say that they suffered poor students.

Still we go to school, take our lumps, get our praises and ultimately go on to real life. Once we are out in the world, what we can or cannot accomplish or what life hands us is subject to infinite variables confirming the old saw that “there are no guarantees in life.”

Not all of us feel that way; some think that a school owes them a living. Particularly if the school is Oxford University.

I don’t know about you, but the closest I got to Oxford was the Oxford Dictionary. Faiz Siddiqui did, however, go to Oxford. Not only that, he graduated in June 2000 with something called a 2:1 degree, which, although it might have thrilled others, was a huge disappointment to him.

So he sued.

Recently.

You read that right. Recently. As in this year. As in seventeen years after he graduated. Or as Oxford’s lawyer put it, “massively” outside the legal time limit. (I just love the way those across the pond talk. It is impossible to improve on “massively” to describe a seventeen-year hiatus, but I digress.)

Mr. Siddiqui wants a million pounds, which at today’s exchange rate is about $1,340,000. His claim is that he received “inadequate” teaching on a special subject that was part of his modern history course. The subject, and I am not making this up, was “The Indigenous Politics and Imperial Control of India between 1916 and 1934.” Now, by most people’s lights, that’s about as narrow a subject imaginable, and whether you got an A+ or a C-, it is unlikely to affect your ability to earn a living in 2017, especially if you received the “second-highest” grade available.

Mr. Siddiqui claims that had he received a first-class degree, he would have become a very successful international commercial lawyer. Of course he would have; no speculation there. That explains my situation in life. I never took “The Indigenous Politics and Imperial Control of India between 1916 and 1934,” so I never had a shot at an international law career.

As you would expect, that is not all there is to it. Because he only received the second-highest grade possible, it exacerbated his depression and insomnia which, in turn, led to rejections at Yale and Harvard law schools. (I successfully avoided those very rejections by not applying, but, again, I digress.)

Mr. Siddiqui’s employment history following graduation from Oxford was conceded by his barrister to be “frankly poor,” and that Mr. Siddiqui had gone to Oxford with “high—perhaps extraordinarily high—expectations.” He asserted that he “had been badly let down by Oxford.”

Not surprisingly, Oxford’s lawyer claimed that Mr.Siddiqui, not the university, was responsible for his lackluster career and described his “alternative” career, i.e., world-renowned commercial lawyer, as “fanciful.”

Oxford attempted to have the case dismissed, or whatever the British equivalent is, on the grounds that too much time had passed, and also that there was no case. The court decided the case might not be time-barred and allowed it to proceed.

At a bifurcated trial on liability, a university witness testified that Mr. Siddiqui had complained about “insufficient resources” but not about the quality of the teaching other than to say it was a “little bit dull.” (No surprise there.) He further said that perhaps Mr. Siddiqui’s poor performance on one paper could be the result of his “serious hay fever,” which is an excuse I could have latched onto had I been more imaginative.

As this goes to press, the judgment has been “reserved,” which I gather is British for “under submission.”

The ultimate result could have interesting consequences in this country. For starters, the ABA may have to require law schools to keep employment statistics for seventeen years post graduation. In any event, I don’t know about you, but I am going to pull all my transcripts.

There has to be a course somewhere that explains what I have not become.

Richard W. Millar, Jr. is Of Counsel with the firm of Friedman Stroffe & Gerard in Irvine. He can be reached at rmillar@fsglawyers.com.

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