Paul Campos had heard plenty of hard-luck stories from unemployed and underemployed law school graduates. Then one of them killed himself.

"I thought well of him, and I even helped him learn a few things worth learning," the University of Colorado Law School professor would write following the 2010 tragedy. "In the end I could do nothing for him — or rather I took part in a process that, it seems, led him down a path that ended in a very dark place."