NEW YORK, March 21 (Reuters) - A judge on Wednesday tossed a $200 million suit brought by a group of New York Law School graduates, who accused their alma mater of duping students out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition by publishing misleading post-graduation employment and salary data.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Melvin Schweitzer dismissed the class action suit brought last year by nine graduates of the school.

The students said the school had misclassified graduates with temporary or part-time jobs as "fully" employed, omitted information about graduates who didn't respond to employment surveys and created post-graduate job programs to hire their own graduates.

Schweitzer pointed out that the students' own complaint acknowledged "one of the grimmest legal job markets in decades," with 43,000 new lawyers minted each year in the U.S. and only half as many jobs available.

"In these new and troubling times, the reasonable consumer of legal education must realize that these omnipresent realities of the market obviously trump any allegedly overly optimistic claims in their law school's marketing materials," Schweitzer wrote in 38-page decision granting the school's motion to dismiss.

David Anziska, an attorney for the plaintiffs, has joined other lawyers in filing similar suits against more than a dozen American law schools.

"We fully disagree with his decision and fully intend to appeal," Anziska said. He said his legal team plans to bring 20 more suits against law schools by Memorial Day.

"We've maintained all along that the claims have no merit," said Venable attorney Michael Volpe, who represents New York Law School.

'DEARTH OF OPPORTUNITY'

The suit against NYLS was one of three proposed class actions filed last year by former law students, who claimed the schools overstated graduates' job prospects. Another wave of suits was filed in February.

Earlier this year, American Bar Association William Robinson sparked controversy when he said in an interview with Reuters that it was "inconceivable" that people in a position to go to law school would not know "that the job market out there is not as opportune as it might have been five, six, seven, eight years ago." An ABA spokeswoman later said Robinson's remarks were used out of context.

The NYLS complaint sought $200 million -- the difference between the tuition the students paid and what they called the "true value" of a NYLS degree. Annual tuition is $47,800.

Schweitzer ruled that NYLS's marketing materials were not misleading -- given that applicants are college graduates capable of reviewing other sources of information about employment prospects before enrolling.

The graduates had argued that the school's statistics were too rosy because U.S. News & World Report put it in the bottom tier of its law school rankings, and "logic dictates that NYLS's true employment rate would be below the statistical mean of the bell curve."

But Schweitzer said the magazine's low ranking should have tipped off prospective students that the school's job data didn't tell the full story.

Schweitzer did acknowledge an unprecedented "dearth of opportunity" for graduates. He quoted the complaint saying that, since 2008, the largest 250 law firms in the U.S. have eliminated 10,000 positions, while legal-entry work such as document review increasingly is being outsourced to such countries as India.

"To the extent law schools are turning out too many graduates for the positions available, market forces will begin to correct themselves, hopefully in short order," the judge wrote.

He added that future graduates are owed transparent data to make informed decisions about law school.

"It is this court's fervent hope," he wrote, "that all the heat generated around this issue over the last year will be replaced with a renewed sense of responsibility to prospective applicants and students."

The case is Alexandra Gomez-Jimenez et at v. New York Law School, New York state Supreme Court, no. 652226/2011.

For the plaintiffs: David Anziska, Jesse Strauss, and Frank Raimond.

For the defendants: Michael J. Volpe of Venable LLP.

(Reporting by Karen Freifeld)

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