Last week, a New York appeals court upheld that Mr Salvador should not receive his LLM from the Touro College Jacob B. Fuchsberg Law Centre as he had not been eligible to enter the program. Mr Salvador was reportedly informed just days prior to his graduation from Touro in January 2012 that he would not be receiving his LLM, as the school had become aware that the institution where he obtained his JD, the Novus University School of Law, was an online law school.
Mr Salvador had disclosed his graduation from Novus University prior to admission into the Touro program and supplied his transcripts after beginning the LLM program in 2011. However, Touro's LLM director Daniel Derby had reportedly been under the impression that Novus was a bricks-and-mortar school in the Phillipines, not an online institution. While a JD obtained in the Phillipines would have been sufficient to permit Mr Salvador's admission to Touro, graduates from online schools were ineligible for the program.
Mr Salvador and Mr Derby reportedly met in 2011 to discuss questions around Mr Salvador's status in the program, though each offers a different account of whether Mr Salvador was informed at that time that he was ineligible for the LLM degree.
The appeals court concluded that Mr Salvador cannot compel Touro to award him his LLM as he failed to alert the school to the fact that Novus was not a bricks-and-mortar school or to correct Mr Derby's misapprehension that Novus was based in the Phillipines. Touro's general counsel Michael Newman praised the court's decision. '[It] sets a very good precendent in that it holds students cannot be passive in determining whether a program they are applying to meets their needs,' he commented in the New York Law Journal.
Source: ABA Journal
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