Summary: A Connecticut lawyer attempts to escape his student loans, but is ordered to pay $236,000.
It would be a savvy move if lawyers could learn the skills by which to outsmart the debtors who financed teaching those skills. That is, like Vivian learning magic from Merlin only to trap him with it. But such things rarely work out in the real world, especially when the Federal government is involved. A Connecticut lawyer who attended the University of Bridgeport Law School, now Quinnipiac School of Law, and who got his Connecticut law license in 1993, stopped paying on his loans in 2002. He claims the government broke the loan agreement by charging him too much.
They sued Gregory Cohan in 2011, therefore, to collect their due, and U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Meyer ruled against him earlier this month, saying “Defendant has presented no evidence to support his statement at oral argument that the government ‘made it impossible for [him] to make the payments,’ or that he was unable to calculate his payments.”
The question turned on whether the federal government was correct in determining his loan agreement in terms not of his 2001 income of $14,605 but of his his 2000 income of $26,960, which changed his monthly payment from $100 to $310.
In considering of 8.25 percent interest rate, his $98,000 loan is now at about $236,500.
News Source: Courant