Legal Advice Needed- Residency for CA

[Michael Davis]

To any lawyers out there,

Recently, my California university rejected my petition for residency despite the fact that I have lived in the state for more than a year. The reason they rejected my petition was because I did not get a CA driver's license, vehicle registration, or voter's card until November of last year, which means I have not "resided" in the state for a year.

Do I have any legal recourse here, or am I pretty much screwed? I established a bank account immediately and have not left the state for any significant period of time.

Thank you for any help you can give. Unfortunately, I cannot login from home right now so I will just have to read the responses and perhaps respond to questions tomorrow.

-Michael

[J.R.]

You are probably screwed, the process for establishing residency is generally laid out pretty clearly so unless California universities have a "waiver" provision for special circumstances, you seem to be SOL. Others have surely been in your shoes before, so its unlikely you will be raising any novel arguments.

[jcx]

Pretend you are an illegal alien.

[elwoodblues]

They've got a definition of residency somewhere in their literature. Take a look at it and see if you meet the definition. It is usually difficult to establish residency while maintaining student status --- why? They don't want students to do exactly what you are doing.

Something to think about is that it might be cheaper in the long term to take time off of being a student to establish residency. When applying for law school, I seriously considered taking time off to establish residency when I was planning on going to a state school. Fortunately a better offer came my way which made tuition a non-issue.

Good luck...when all is said and done, I doubt they'll consider you a resident.

[sam h]

Michael,

I just went through the same bullshit. I hope you know that there is an appellate process, during which you write a formal appeal that is evaluated by a legal analyst for the Cal state university system. This individual is vested with more discretion in judging the merits of individual cases than your campus residency bureaucrats.

I didn't get my license and voter registration until last May and I won my appeal for residency for this fall a few weeks ago after being originally denied by the office at UC-Berkeley.

If you haven't already, you should definitely appeal. If you want, PM me about this with your email and I will send you a copy of the appeal that I wrote so you can get some idea of what one successful appeal looked like.

Sam

[Oski]

[ QUOTE ]
Michael,

I just went through the same bullshit. I hope you know that there is an appellate process, during which you write a formal appeal that is evaluated by a legal analyst for the Cal state university system. This individual is vested with more discretion in judging the merits of individual cases than your campus residency bureaucrats.

I didn't get my license and voter registration until last May and I won my appeal for residency for this fall a few weeks ago after being originally denied by the office at UC-Berkeley.

If you haven't already, you should definitely appeal. If you want, PM me about this with your email and I will send you a copy of the appeal that I wrote so you can get some idea of what one successful appeal looked like.

Sam

[/ QUOTE ]

Good advice, Sam. Let me add one thing. I do believe the appeal will be worthwhile. The U of Cal, and Cal State systems have been troubled with "residency" fraud, etc. On close cases, they are more inclined to deny. If an applicant is sketchy, the applicant usually will not press the issue ... or force it into greater scrutiny.

Therefore, if you made a legit effort to get residency, go for the appeal.