After spending the last 36 hours getting walloped by a historic snow storm — one some meteorologists dubbed a “Snowicane” — the New York Board of Law Examiners responded with all the compassion and common sense of a parking meter. Have your ass in its seat this morning, or be branded as “withdrawn” from the exam.
Over 10,000 flights have been canceled since Sunday, as one of the New York airports reported over 27 inches of snow, and clearing the backlog has some travelers waiting until the end of the week for a flight. Ground transportation wasn’t much better with New York City imposing a travel ban during the height of the storm. And while NYC has cleared major thoroughfares, roads across the region remain, as the National Weather Service helpfully noted, “nearly impossible” to navigate.
In response, the NY Board of Law Examiners told bar applicants to figure it out or get bent.
According to the ABA Journal, the Board’s information number delivered the following message to applicants who might not be able to, you know, traverse a historic blizzard to reach their testing center this morning:
Failure to show up at the exam will not prevent you from reapplying for a future administration of the bar exam in New York unless you have three or more withdrawals and absences, in which case you will need to petition the board for permission to reapply.
“Withdrawn,” because you made the deeply personal choice not to risk your life on black ice at 6 a.m. to wax philosophic about the Rule Against Perpetuities. See, the Board wants you to know that they aren’t punishing you… you’re punishing yourself by not having the foresight to live closer to a testing center. Do you know how bad it was out there? DoorDash canceled service, and their motto is: Neither rain nor gloom of night stays these couriers from providing your burrito a personal limousine.
Also, the bar exam message says nothing about refunds because of course it doesn’t.
Without downplaying how much this sucks for anyone trying to get to New York, what makes this policy so reckless is that law school graduates looking to take the bar are exactly the kind of people who will risk a drive on treacherous roads to keep their jobs.
And it’s not just New York City. The Long Island location got hammered with over 15 inches and many folks heading to the Albany location travel up from NYC, having only been relegated to the capital by virtue of having attended a non-NY law school before moving to NYC to begin their careers.
Back in 2013, Missouri’s Board of Law Examiners forced applicants into a blizzard and the power went out during the exam. You’d think the legal profession might have developed some institutional memory about this kind of thing. But — and I cannot stress this enough — once you accept the premise that the bar exam is a good idea in the first place, you’ve already signaled that all that matters is performative hardship. Remember how the various state bars had to be dragged kicking and screaming into acknowledging that they might not be able to ram hundreds of applicants into a room during a deadly pandemic? During COVID, bar examiners hinted at denying licenses to anyone who publicly criticized them for forcing applicants to subject themselves to an in-person petri dish.
The bar exam is always form over substance, but it takes emergencies like these to distill how rotten that obsession becomes. If the goal was really to test minimum competence, there are multiple avenues to make that happen. But since the goal is actually the uncritical devotion to a gatekeeping mechanism of dubious value, then of course a licensing authority cannot even conceive of a world involving reasonable delays or makeups or any other accommodations. The test that matters to them is getting bodies in the room that they want you to be in, full stop. These applicants spent months studying, paid their application fees, and many went to great lengths to try to travel from out of state.
And the bar examiner position is essentially, fuck them kids.
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 or Bluesky 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.
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