Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on motherhood in the legal profession, in partnership with our friends at MothersEsquire. Welcome Jaclyn Roy to our pages. Click here if you’d like to donate to MothersEsquire.
It is a new year, and even in 2024, due to a draconian lack of standard policy for pumping accommodations, the bar exam is not conducive to success for lactating examinees. As a law student with ADHD, I can rest assured that my disability will at the very least be considered and that I will likely be afforded accommodations including extra time, a distraction-free testing environment, and a paper copy of the exam due to the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Because of widespread regulations, many students like me with various disabilities will face few hurdles in applying for and obtaining specific protections covered under ADA policy. At the same time, many lactating bar examinees will seek similarly necessary accommodations and reach a dead end in the absence of clear, consistent, and accessible policy. It is preposterous that a process for at least applying for breastfeeding-related bar exam accommodations is neither universally regulated nor available across all states.
This past fall, two of my law school peers and I conducted follow-up research on past metrics documented by the ACLU as well as MothersEsquire regarding pumping/lactation accommodations for state bar examinations. We ultimately found that only 10 states have a policy listed on their bar websites for lactation accommodations that include additional stop-the-clock break time to pump if necessary. A meager 15 states have a policy for lactation accommodations detailed on their bar websites but do not include additional break time with these accommodations. Nine states provide lactation accommodations, but policy regarding accommodations available or request requirements is unclear or unavailable. And 15 states are still lacking policies altogether — with 10 state websites still only having info pertaining to ADA disabilities, and five having no information on their websites at all.
In 2021, MothersEsquire found that 19 states still only published accommodations for ADA disabilities, of which lactation does not qualify, or simply published no accommodation information at all. Now, in 2024, not much has changed on that front — 15 states having only ADA accommodation information on their websites, or none at all — compared to 19 states three years prior. In other words, progress has not been made in the past several years, considering that only four of the 19 states published or made available non-ADA related accommodations for the bar exam over this three-year span — comparing our 2021 research to the new statistics we found in 2024.
To put it simply: only 25 of the states in our country have publicly available, clear, and concise regulations for bar exam lactation accommodations in 2024. Fifteen of those do not include additional stop-the-clock break time for pumping, so examinees in these states will lose testing time in order to utilize their pumping accommodation. Future research and policy should focus on encouraging state bar boards to implement policies with stop-the-clock break time.
I fear for the multiple expecting and new mothers in my law school class and students around the country that will have to jump through hoops to — hopefully — attain pumping accommodations when we take the bar exam next summer. While progress has been made and is continuing to be made, the progress is slow. It is a shame that we are still fighting for bar exam accommodations for lactating/pumping bar examinees, but the progress being made is hopeful nonetheless.
At the end of the day, it is obvious that state bars still vary significantly in terms of making publicly available and accessible bar exam accommodation information for lactating mothers via their websites. The efforts of MothersEsquire and others have been crucial in urging the public availability and accessibility of bar exam accommodations for pumping/lactation purposes.
Note from MothersEsquire: Every single bar exam cycle, winter and summer, the MothersEsquire Board fields desperate calls for help from pumping test-takers around the country, most of whom either have been denied accommodations altogether or who simply cannot find information as to whether there are accommodations to seek in the first instance. Enough is enough. We call on bar examiners around the country to adopt policies in line with ABA Resolution 501 to not only provide lactation accommodations but to also publicize those accommodations on their websites so test takers know where and how to secure them. The lack of accommodations is a bar to the bar — stopping some prospective lawyers in their tracks at the very outset of what could be an incredibly impactful career.
Jaclyn Roy is a rising third-year law student at the University of Louisville’s Brandeis School of Law. She is a Law Clerk for Fore Law PLLC, where she assists with research and drafting on a wide variety of civil law matters. She looks forward to practicing civil law in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky.