Legal Commentary

My name is Michael Waterstone, and I teach at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.  I am also one of our associate deans.  My research is primarily in disability and civil rights law, and I also teach civil procedure and employment law.  This is my first venture into blogging, and I'm pleased to be visiting Prawfs with my colleagues Kurt Lash and Sasha Natapoff.  In fact, pretty much everything I know about blogging I learned from Sasha in a tutorial she kindly provided me a few days ago (all mistakes, it goes without saying, are my fault and not hers). 

For my introductory post, I wanted to highlight the case of Stephanie Enyart.  During a time of year when many students are recovering from just having taken the bar, Stephanie had to work a good bit harder than most to secure the pleasure of taking the test.  Stephanie is a graduate of UCLA Law School who is blind.  In law school, she used a computer equipped with screen reading software (called JAWS) and screen magnificent software (called ZoomText) for exams.  She requested these accommodations for the bar exam, providing extensive documentation as to why they were needed.  The State Bar of California approved Stephanie's request for the sections of the exam it controls.  But the National Conference of Bar Examiners, which administers the multistate and MPRE parts of the bar, declined.  Based on security fears, it offered a series of different accommodations.  Stephanie submitted evidence that these accommodations would not allow her to take the bar without severely impacting her exam performance.

Represented by a top flight legal team, Stephanie brought a claim under the Americans with Disabilities Act in the Northern District of California.  About two weeks before the bar exam, the court granted Stephanie's motion for a preliminary injunction, finding that Stephanie's request was reasonable and that the NCBE's concerns about security could be minimized by allowing Stephanie to take the exam on an NCBE computer.  Apparently feeling that the world might come to an end if Stephanie was allowed to take the bar with her requested accommodations, the NCBE made Stephanie's last two weeks of bar prep a little more interesting by seeking an emergency ruling from the Ninth Circuit suspending the District Court's order.  They argued that forcing Stephanie to wait until July to take the bar did not pose a hardship on her.  They were unsuccessful, and Stephanie was able to take the February bar.  While awaiting bar results, Stephanie is working as a Skadden fellow at Disability Rights Advocates in Berkeley.