Editorial
May 3, 2001
The University of Toronto law school had no choice but to impose a meaningful penalty on students caught lying to prospective employers.
Thirty students lied about their midterm marks for summer jobs, and the punishment in the first eight cases is a one-year suspension. Lawyer Clayton Ruby, hired by 17 students, calls the discipline "cruel," saying the school should find a creative punishment such as free legal work.
The university rightly realized that such creativity would have been inappropriate. The only way to make this bad situation worse would have been to signal that this wasn't treated as a grievous breach of conduct.
Our sympathies for the students' predicament is limited by the knowledge that they are not immature children, but well-educated adults attending an expensive law school and often seeking jobs at Bay Street firms. The students can be thankful they were not expelled, although their law prospects are dim. Surely nothing -- even a lesser punishment -- can fix that now.