*Class Action Lawsuit Seeking Undergraduates*
After student fees were raised last year, a lawsuit was filed by a number of graduate students from throughout the UC system. A Daily Cal article from last February had information on the early stages of that lawsuit:

Eight student plaintiffs from four UC campuses filed the lawsuit last summer, charging they were not given enough time to plan for fee increases. The suit also claims UC broke a contract not to change professional student fees during the course of enrollment.
...
Student fees shot up more 35 percent last year. The first 10 percent hike for spring 2003 came after students had already registered for the term. And five days before summer session classes began, fees at UC Berkeley rose an additional $160 for undergraduates and $180 for graduate students.
The students seek to refund the past year’s increases and halt any future jumps.
...
The plaintiffs said UC broke a contract not to change the fees, as stated in a catalog for Boalt Hall School of Law.

That lawsuit is back in the news. It has been expanded to now include undergraduates as a party to the class action lawsuit, according to an e-mail I received from the law firm representing the grad students. To see the entire text of the e-mail, which contains information on who is eligible to be a member of the class, and what the next steps in the lawsuit will be, click here.

Any student who was enrolled at Berkeley last spring (when the fees were raised), is now potentially a member of the class that this lawsuit is being waged on behalf of. If court rulings do not create a solution to this case, it will go to trial in May, 2005.

CalStuff will have more information on this once we are able to speak to Kashmiri, the law firm representing the students, and the University.Email This Post!