About Me 0060: Making Money Scam

I’ve talked a lot about how law schools rip off law students, so I guess I can’t be surprised when a law student tries to turn the tables.

Reports coming out of Ohio today tell us that a 2L at the Ohio State Moritz College of Law has allegedly been stealing and reselling library books; $10,000 worth of library books.

The 2L won’t speak to reporters, but school officials claim they caught him during a “sting” operation. The kid would resell the library books online, so school officials order a book from him, and place a hidden camera in the stacks next to the book. When he went to retrieve the requested copy: bang, busted.

To put the crime in context, the $10K this kid allegedly made off of reselling library books is less than a quarter of the expected budget one Ohio resident is expected to pay for the right to attend Moritz College of Law. Just throwing that out there as something for people to think about…

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Obviously, I’m not condoning criminal behavior. Local news in Columbus has the details on this kid’s alleged thievery:

According to a search warrant, the second-year student — who is not being identified because he has not been charged — sold more than 200 books that belonged to the Moritz College of Law library, 10TV’s Kevin Landers reported.
University police believe the student sold books from the library dating back to January, making more than $10,000 in the process, Landers reported.

style="text-decoration: underline;">Ed. Note: Yeah, we know the kid’s name. But as he is a law student who hasn’t been charged with anything, we’re not going to post it.

It seems to me that this kid is no better than the law school officials who are charging people enormous sums of money for an education of questionable value. There’s no way 200 law books are worth $10,000. This 2L has just been taking advantage of people who think legal education is worth more than it is.

I wonder where he learned that?

Taking advantage of the credulous simplicity of others is how the kid was eventually caught:

The investigation unfolded when a lawyer in Brazil grew suspicious about one of the books she had purchased, Landers reported.
She apparently noticed that the book’s library stamp was crossed out with a black marker, which led her to call the library with questions.
“She thought some of the markings on the book were suspicious,” said University police Det. Pete Dragonette.

I love that trying to convince a Brazilian lawyer that there was some value in American legal tomes was his eventual undoing. Clearly, lawyers in Brazil aren’t as naive as he thought. The kid would have been better off keeping his scam to American college graduates with liberal arts degrees. That’s how the professionals make their money.

Meanwhile, I think it’s a wonderful commentary on the state of legal education that 200 books can go missing from a law library and nobody notices. Honestly, when will U.S. News stop counting “volumes in the library” as one of its ranking criteria for law schools? People study in a library because of what it doesn’t have (noise, playstations, internet porn, bedbugs) not because of what it does have (books, mood lighting, librarians who want to be “sexy librarians” but are not). The books in the library thing is consistently the dumbest thing U.S. News does every single year.

In any event, I can’t be shocked to see morally questionable behavior coming out of law students. They’re being taken advantage of and whenever you put people in that situation the chances increase that they’ll do something criminal.

Plus, this is The Ohio State, after all. As a friend of mine is fond of saying: “Maurice Clarett is a lot of things, but he’s not a liar.” Go Blue!

Charges Likely In Ohio State Library Thefts [10 T.V. News: Central Ohio]