Indebted law students turn industry on its ear

“The Law School Scam,” a 2014 investigative article in The Atlantic, was the inspiration for John Grisham’s latest novel, “The Rooster Bar.” Grisham’s tale is a thoroughly engaging, seriocomic caper that satirizes and exposes unsavory for-profit law schools, along with banks that exploit students with loans they’ll never be able to pay off, unfair United States immigration policies and the entire legal profession in this country.

In the novel, Mark Frazier, Todd Lucero and Zola Maal are thirdyear law students in D.C., enrolled in a bottom-of-the-line, for-profit institution called Foggy Bottom Law School.

Each of the three is drowning in student debt, which it would seem will be impossible to ever pay off. By the start of their final semester, they have all learned that their employment prospects are bleak, and their chances of paying off their loans are essentially nonexistent.

Zola is a black Muslim-American woman of Senegalese descent, born in the United States and therefore a citizen. Her parents and younger brother, however, are in the country illegally. Zola is involved with a handsome, athletic WASP law student, Gordon (“Gordy”) Tanner, who happens to be bipolar.

In one of his manic moments, Gordon exhibits to Zola and her friends an expose of the billionaire investment crook, Hinds Rackley, who owns and controls not just the law school but the banks that provide student loans.

Soon afterward, Gordy kills himself. To honor Gordy in his attempt to expose Rackley — and to get themselves out of their mountains of debt — Mark, Todd and Zola team up to invent new identities and a nonexistent law firm of their own. According to some studies, Unauthorized Practice of Law (UPL) is a felony, but it’s usually treated lightly, and seldom punished by real jail time. So, all bets are off.

This is the setup for Grisham’s wild, hard-to-put-down romp. It’s no surprise that his far-fetched plot is compelling from chapter to chapter. It appears funny, but his characters’ travails reflect those of a significant number of millennials duped by unscrupulous banks and businesses.

The brief scenes in which Zola’s family languish in a detention facility (read: jail) are harrowing. So is the abuse they receive on arriving in Senegal, although the adventures of Zola and her American cohorts alleviate the horror, when the Americans travel to Africa to rescue the unfortunate deportees.