Search Results for: diploma privilege

By a vote of 256-146 Tuesday afternoon, the American Bar Association House of Delegates approved Resolution 10G, urging “the highest court or bar admission authority of each jurisdiction to cancel and to not administer any in-person bar examination during the COVID-19 pandemic until and unless public health authorities determine that the examination can be administered [...]

The Uniform Bar Examination is always given on the last Tuesday and Wednesday in July, even, it turns out, in the midst of a pandemic. On July 27, the date of the bar exam, 1,126 lives were lost to COVID-19. Despite this, today almost 200 future lawyers — myself included — sat in-person for the [...]

The Virgin Islands Bar Association has presented a wide-ranging draft resolution to the American Bar Association urging its House of Delegates in their meeting next week to temporarily cancel in-person administrations of the bar examination and to not administer any other in-person bar examination during the COVID-19 pandemic until and unless public health authorities determine [...]

The three-year journey has ended. Clearing one more hurdle, you would join your chosen profession. But as you approached the hurdle, becoming a lawyer resembled joining a craft guild. Bar admission committees seemed intent on elevating custom over common sense. The infamous bar exam became a pandemic year proxy for antiquated legal industry rituals. What [...]

The long-offered and frequently invoked justification for the bar exam is that the public must be protected from legal incompetence. That is a legitimate, worthy, and necessary concern. Incompetent attorneys erode society’s trust in our profession. Bad lawyering costs clients their money, their rights, and sometimes even their lives.  Yet in their fervor to do [...]

The month of July has almost ended and the Bar Exam is just as much in flux now as it was back in April. For many applicants to the bar, the situation is changing on a daily basis. Just this past week the applicants to the Louisiana Bar were granted Emergency Diploma Privilege. Indiana was [...]

I have been home to see my family only once since quarantine began mid-march. I haven’t seen my friends since classes moved online and remote work became the new normal. I have quit going to a public gym and order groceries online. I wear a mask into the post office and bank (and did so [...]

At 4 pm on July 29, I will walk out of the Holiday Inn in Columbia, Missouri, after completing the second day of the Uniform Bar Exam, thus concluding one of the most important steps in my professional career. Yet, I will have a completely different set of test results on my mind. Will I [...]

On July 15, 2020, the New Jersey Supreme Court released an Order declaring that the Bar Exam would be administered online. This would be the first time the NJ Bar exam was ever administered online. The move to online seems like a good idea amid a global pandemic killing Americans at an exorbitant rate; however, [...]

The New York Board of Law Examiners announced late Thursday that the bar exam scheduled for September 9-10 is canceled due to COVID-19. The New York Court of Appeals issued an order that the Appellate Division of the Court of Appeals has the discretion to temporarily license certain law graduates for supervised law practice. These [...]