Law student takes Oslo to court over unrecognised external credit

Universities can be reluctant to recognise other institutions’ teaching as equivalent to their own, but a case in Norway could set a legal precedent and invite urgent reviews of how external credit is handled, according to the lawyers involved.

Law student Ove Kenneth Nodland is suing the University of Oslo over what he claims are inconsistent and unsupported rejections of study credit earned at other universities, after he was forced to repeat modules he had already taken at the University of Oxford.

There is a well-established precedent of Europeans suing employers and institutions over the non-recognition of qualifications earned abroad, but cases based solely on course credits are rare.

Mr Nodland studied a master’s in jurisprudence at Oxford before enrolling in a fast-track law course to practise in Norway at Oslo, but was forced to take similar modules on legal methods and critical thinking twice.

His class action suit claiming more than 500 million Norwegian krone (£40 million) in damages has been submitted on behalf of approximately 2,000 students, who say they were also unfairly forced to repeat external courses. Since his case became public, he told Times Higher Education, he has been contacted by a further 30 people who think they might have cases.

Mr Nodland claims Oslo has breached the 1997 Lisbon recognition convention, which requires an institution to show there is a “substantial difference” between an outside course and the home equivalent before rejecting externally earned credit. The convention is a legally binding complement to the voluntary Bologna Process, a higher education standard-setting group made up mostly of European countries.

In his legal complaint Mr Nodland said he had reviewed 750 of Oslo’s foreign study rejection decisions and found only a handful cited the threshold set out in the law. “I noticed how the reasons for rejecting my courses varied depending on who made the decision, so there seemed to be no overall system or guidelines,” he said.

Mr Nodland, who said he had spent more than 300 hours on the complaint so far, said he was motivated by a “deep sense of injustice” that students were needlessly being forced to repeat work, racking up living costs and delaying graduation and earnings.

He has pro bono help from lawyers Mads Andenæs and Carl Baudenbacher. Professor Andenæs, a researcher at Oslo and the University of London, said the case could affect “every university and every degree” in the more than 50 countries that have signed the Lisbon convention.

Aside from the costs and damages students could claim for having to repeat credit, he said politicians could come down hard on universities seen to be wasting public resources with overly strict decisions, adding that even a partial victory in Oslo should make other universities “sit up and take notice”.

While the rejection of outside credit was widespread, he said, programmes that lead to professional careers such as law or medicine were particularly at risk from legal challenges based on deferred income.

Professor Baudenbacher, who is also a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, said the case could be heard at the European Court of Human Rights if it fails at the Oslo district court, citing the right to education.

The University of Oslo confirmed it had received the complaint but declined to comment further on the case.

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com