A California appeals court has upheld the University of Southern California's expulsion of a former law student who cheated in an attempt to get onto law review, then tried to pin the blame on a classmate once she was discovered.

Claudine Tinsman had argued that she was suffering from mental illness at the time of her transgressions, and that the university had not properly followed a lower court's directive to reconsider her case in light of that disclosure. But a three-judge panel of Division Seven of the Second Appellate District on Monday ruled that a subsequent university misconduct panel had appropriately weighed Tinsman's mental illness when it recommended for a second time that she should be expelled. Expulsion is the appropriate sanction for the severity of her offenses—which included criminal acts—even in light of her mental illness, that panel found.

“Ms. Tinsman's actions included: lying to a fellow student to obtain access to her computer, accessing the student's work, copying that work and misrepresenting it as her own, hacking into the student's email account, submitting a false admission on behalf of that student, repeatedly lying to university authorities during the course of the investigation, and causing harm to a fellow student,” according to the university panel report quoted in the appellate court's opinion.