Right… you can’t do this now.
The New York Board of Law Examiners already recognized that the Fall bar exam administration would be a logistical nightmare with the large venues usually booked for the test either unavailable on the new dates or unable to accommodate nearly the crowd with the distancing requirements people are still going to want to live by in September. We knew that charting a course for staggering the bar exam for everyone who wants to take it would be a process fraught with risk that the BOLE could easily end up pissing off a lot of people and it’s good to see our suspicions confirmed.
Announcing new bar exam guidelines, New York has figured out where it plans to draw the line on the Fall exam and it’s drawing it right at the New York border:
[A]pplications will be accepted from any J.D. or LL.M. candidate who is sitting for the bar examination for the first time and who has graduated (or will graduate in Spring 2020) from one of the fifteen law schools located in New York State: Albany Law School, Brooklyn Law School, University at Buffalo School of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Columbia Law School, CUNY School of Law, Cornell Law School, Fordham University School of Law, Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University, New York Law School, New York University School of Law, Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, St. John’s University School of Law, Syracuse University College of Law, or Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center.
The 15 NY law schools will fill up the available bar exam seats, with registration running from May 5 to May 15, and “priority will not be given based on the date a candidate registers within that period.” After that, the state will consider what meager accommodations it has left, but with the bar already expected to be squatting in borrowed facilities just to meet this demand, it’s unlikely there will be many scraps left.
But it’s not like there are a ton of better options. With the big convention halls out, the bar exam is only happening because the New York law schools are donating their facilities. It’s a hard sell to say, “Thanks for the lecture hall, but we can’t let your folks take the exam because we need to shove a bunch of UVA people in here… thanks for understanding!”
This solution, as you might imagine, earned the ire of out-of-state law schools who routinely send their graduates to New York to work because, let’s be honest, few are lining up to start a legal career in New Haven and only about 10 percent of Dukies stick in the Southeast. The T14 — or maybe the T11 of schools not in New York — send substantial numbers to this market and the next clutch of law schools in the rankings, the T14 Penumbra if you will, aren’t exactly skimping on NY bar applicants every year.
Penn Law’s Ted Ruger took a welcome break from worrying about which Amy Wax outburst he’s going to have to deal with next to inform students that he and some amalgam of unnamed other T14 deans are pissed:
The order is misguided and quite possibly unlawful. It comes as a surprise to us, and to the deans at similarly situated top schools outside of New York with whom I have been in communication this evening. We plan to work collectively and individually in every way possible in the coming week to advocate against this decision. I am also meeting with our law school board tomorrow at 9:00 am, and have alerted them about the order and that this will be our main agenda item. The board includes several leaders at major NY firms to whom this also came as an unwelcome surprise, and they have let me know that they will work with us to challenge this unfair rule.
“Possibly unlawful”! Are the law schools going to sue New York over this? A fun hypo for the Con Law nerds out there. But what’s the alternative? If he used this email to pitch some form of diploma privilege plus or an online bar exam that would help generate some needed momentum for those entirely reasonable reforms. And maybe that’s ultimately what he’s going to do, but the tone of the message strongly indicates that he just wants New York to not give registration preference to New York students as if the state facing a massive shortage of seats should just hand a bunch of them to Penn at the expense of Fordham because U.S. News wills it so. That’s not a productive starting point.
For its part, the BOLE is encouraging out-of-state grads to consider taking the UBE in other jurisdictions, allowing New York to bring them in at a later date. On its face this isn’t an absurd proposal, but scratching the surface this poses other problems. If these people are going to be working in New York until they get licensed, is it fair to expect them to trek back to the sticks to take the bar exam? Can you even take the exam in a state if you never intend to apply for admission there? These states aren’t equipped to accommodate this influx of unexpected examinees in normal times let alone when facilities are at a premium.
We’re at this point because we’re still clinging to a bar exam tradition forged in an era when we didn’t have established professional schools and apprentices or even just random people could just apply to be lawyers. We know the bar exam has serious flaws, this is where we should be thinking creatively about better solutions. Diploma privilege systems won’t be easy and may require radical reforms of the law school system itself but watching how easily the existing regime goes off the rails should encourage everyone in the profession to take up the challenge.
Earlier: NY Bar Exam Encounters New Hurdle — Not Enough Space To Test Everyone
Law School Student Governments Petitioning For Diploma-Privileged Admission
NCBE Trashes Diploma Privilege, Sprinkles In Some Racist And Sexist Conclusions
Why Attorney Supervision Could Undermine The ‘Diploma Privilege Plus’ Movement