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| Don't study in the state of New York? No NY Bar Exam For You! |
From Above the Law:
"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 [angering] a lot of people and it’s good to see our suspicions confirmed."
New York has announced new bar exam guidelines during this nasty time, stating where it plans on drawing the line on the Fall exam. That line will be drawn right at the border of New York!
[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.
There are fifteen law schools in New York, and they will be the schools that fill up the available bar exam seats. Registration will run from May 5th to May 15th. Priority will be given based on the date that a candidate registers within that period. Afterward, the state will consider what kinds of accommodations are left over.
With convention halls out of the question, the options that are left are facilities that have been donated from New York state law schools (the Javits Center in New York City, where I took the bar exam after graduating from Brooklyn Law School is now being used as a COVID-19 care facility). The idea that non-New York law school graduates can't take the bar exam in New York, which is often known as the creme de la cream of the legal world, is maddening. This is especially true of schools that feed into New York, such as the T14, with Yale just right across the border in Connecticut. I guess that students from these schools are just going to have to start looking somewhere other than the big apple for jobs once they graduate from law school. And they said 2013 was a bad year to graduate.
This is a really bad situation. Many are hoping to take the bar exam in NY because that's where the jobs are. Many of us went to Georgetown, Yale, Harvard, or Boston U. because we expected that we would end up in NY. These schools are higher ranked than schools like NYLS, yet many of us are shut out from the bar exam for at least a year. Not good! Not good at all! It's a shame that they can't let in the top 10% or something to take the bar in NY. New York will lose out in the end.
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