Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Money + MU = bad

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Mike Miller wrote:

> On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Michael Procter wrote:
> 
> > Some law students dredged up an 1872 law which says "youths" of the
> > state may attend without paying tuition and filed a class action
> > lawsuit.  The University contends that it charged incidental fees, not
> > tuition, but apparently the judge wasn't impressed with that argument.
> 
> That's interesting.  The law was made by Missouri legislators.  
> They can now repeal the law retrospectively and avoid paying any
> money.  I hope they'll do it right away.  It's just absurd that
> an old unused law is causing so much trouble!

Uh...no.  The law was ammended and so *now* the youth of Missouri
can be charged any reasonable tuition fee etc.  What the Legistature
cannot do is institute the fees retroactively, any more than they
can make a retroactive (i.e., for a previous tax year) tax or fee
increase. The point was that the fees were illegal when assessed, so
damage was incurred by paying such fees, so there is a legal case
that the legislature cannot pre-empt.  (Otherwise, they could
legislate themselves out of any situations where the states would
owe damages.) Now, what could happen is that the legislature could 
authorize the repayment schedule to be really long and change the 
statuatory interest rate from date X in the future to be something 
really nominal, or a lot of other things.  But retroactively 
changing the law so that an illegal action was legal (or the 
opposite) will not fly.

jking


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