Stop me if you’ve heard this before, because I’ve definitely written it before. A state experiencing a surge in COVID infections issues both state and local occupancy restrictions to control the spread of the deadly disease and then issues exemptions for the in-person bar exam to crowd people into a room as if JDs were f**king inoculation records. Get ready to spin the wheel kids to figure out what state we’re talking about this time…
It’s Hawai’i!
There’s a 200 applicant in-person bar exam coming up in September. And don’t worry, they’re sticking with the two day format so we’re forcing people from across the state to get hotel rooms and spend a good 72-hours casually spreading illness around the state capital. There’s a 5-person occupancy limit in the city. The convention center is closed to the public.
But not for the bar exam! No, for the bar exam every bet is off.
And Hawai’i State House of Representative John Mizuno, who chairs the Health Committee, has slyly called out the Judiciary Committee for being asleep at the wheel with a public statement of his own:
I say this with sensitivity and sincerity, we are in the greatest pandemic since the 1918 Spanish Flu, with a death toll of over 800,000 worldwide and over one hundred seventy- eight thousand fatalities in the United States. The current surge in COVID-19 cases along with the strict stay-at-home order issued for the island of Oahu makes an in-person exam unreasonable. Any future in-person exam while COVID-19 remains active would have to be carefully administered to ensure full protection of participants. I don’t know if I would have an adequate reply to a loved one of a husband, wife, partner, parent, or child who died because of COVID-19 and it could have been prevented by alternatives.
Mizuno isn’t necessarily calling for diploma privilege, though he cites it as an option. He’s taking the “I don’t know the answer but it sure as hell ain’t this” approach, which is desperately needed in these times.
And yet, we’ve not seen enough prominent voices on that train. Hop on folks, there’s plenty of room.
We can even socially distance.
Law school grads fear catching COVID-19 during bar exam [Star Advertiser]
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.