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California judge: Blind attorney licensing test-taker can use laptop
Listen to this articleTimothy Elder, one of the three blind law school graduates who passed the Maryland bar exam last year even though a federal judge denied his request to use computer screen-access software, will take this weekend’s California attorney licensing test with his preferred accommodation, thanks to a San Francisco judge’s ruling last week.
“It’s a really nice win for Tim, and now he just has to go pass the California bar,” said Daniel Goldstein, Elder’s attorney and colleague at Brown, Goldstein & Levy LLP in Baltimore.
U.S. District Judge Susan Illston granted Elder’s motion for a preliminary injunction over arguments from the National Council of Bar Examiners, which creates the Multistate Bar Exam portion of the licensing test. From coast to coast, the NCBE has maintained that the aid of a human reader is a reasonable accommodation for blind test-takers like Elder and suggested that loading the MBE on a laptop presents security concerns.
Illston’s ruling last Wednesday comes just more than a month after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, also in San Francisco, upheld a similar injunction in a California woman’s case against the NCBE.
Following the appellate court’s ruling, Illston decided the JAWS software is necessary to “best ensure” that Elder’s performance on the California exam, which is longer and has a lower passage rate than the Maryland test, reflects his aptitude, not his disability.
“In sum, given the history of Elder’s particular impairment, his experience with various accommodations — including his ability to achieve a level of automaticity in ‘reading’ with JAWS — and given the particular characteristics of the California bar, the Court finds that use of a live reader would not make the California bar accessible to Elder,” the judge wrote. “Instead, Elder has demonstrated that a computer equipped with JAWS would best ensure that his performance on the MBE component, as well as on the bar exam as a whole, would accurately reflect his abilities instead of his visual impairment and is a necessary accommodation.”
