Author
April 13, 2026
Daniel Thies, Council Chair
American Bar Association
Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar
Via email: NoticeandComment@americanbar.org
Re: Matters for Notice and Comment on Standard 316 and Standard 509
The National Disabled Legal Professionals Association (NDLPA) d/b/a Crip the Law is a national association of disabled lawyers, judges, policy experts, legislators, academics, and other legal workers, professionals, and organizers. Crip the Law was founded in 2022 to organize and unify disabled legal professionals into a force for change, and to advocate for and empower disabled legal professionals. Crip the Law has a vested interest in ensuring there are alternative pathways to licensure that do not necessitate taking the bar exam and more inclusively and equitably account for the needs and experiences of disabled and multiply-marginalized individuals. Disabled lawyers are valuable members of our profession who bring unique solutions and perspectives based on their experience. Our paths to licensure must reflect our values if we want to build a diverse and culturally competent profession.
Crip the Law supports revisions that recognize and facilitate the pursuit of alternative licensure pathways. However, given the fact that so many states do not offer an alternative pathway to licensure, the proposal, as written, changes very little—including the potential impact on disabled law students and test takers. Crip the Law recommends that the American Bar Association (ABA), 1) eliminate the strict percentage requirement, which, as written, would be essentially unenforceable, and 2) leverage its position in the legal profession to more meaningfully support and encourage alternative licensure options, including diploma privilege.
- The Bar Exam Disadvantages Test Takers with Disabilities
Despite the fact that more than 28 percent of adult Americans identify as having a disability,[1] only 5 percent of surveyed lawyers, judges, magistrates, and other judicial workers identified as having a disability as of 2023.[2] And as of 2025, disabled lawyers only represent about 2.13 percent of partners and 3.06 percent of all lawyers at firms.[3] While this percentage marks an increase over the last several years, the numbers are still abysmally low and likely underreported.[4]
Adopting a method of licensure that is only achievable by taking the bar exam is particularly problematic for disabled applicants. High-stakes standardized testing such as the bar exam “reinforces outdated thinking of what intelligence, achievement, and competence mean” and is “rife with ableist assumptions.”[5] In addition to the sheer cost of taking and preparing for the exam that disproportionately impacts disabled people, who are more likely to experience poverty,[6] disabled test takers face extensive barriers to accessing accommodations. In order to apply for accommodations, disabled candidates are subject to arduous and invasive accommodation application procedures that often take several months to complete and require expensive evaluations by professionals who do not traditionally accept insurance. Bar exam accommodation procedures are superfluous and go above and beyond similar processes by peer institutions like law schools, colleges, and other standardized testing organizations.
But accommodations can only go so far to “level the playing field” for disabled test takers. Frankly, the nature of the bar exam itself makes it all the more difficult to succeed as a disabled test taker. The bar exam, as currently designed, is a test of speed, memory, and endurance—not one of true analytical or lawyering skill. This is not a matter of competency, but one of systematic and intentional discrimination and exclusion.
Disabled law students and attorneys universally experience unrelenting social and physical barriers to access beginning with the LSAT and continuing and right up until the day they retire or are prematurely forced out of the profession. These barriers not only harm individuals but drain the legal profession of talented and passionate advocates.
Equal access to the legal profession hinges on equitable licensure procedures and practices. While the COVID-19 pandemic should have served as a wake-up call that our system is broken, nearly all jurisdictions have since reverted to business as usual with no alternative options for licensure. Disabled test takers have continued to bear the brunt of this deliberate choice. We know there are paths forward that would better assess minimum competence to perform the required duties of attorneys in a manner that is more aligned with practice, and jurisdictions may offer multiple options for pathways to licensure.[7] We also know based on available data that attorney misconduct complaints Wisconsin, which offers diploma privilege, is no different from the number of complaints in other jurisdictions.[8] And yet, nearly all states have chosen to forego those options and continue down an unnecessarily exclusionary path that protects neither the public nor the integrity of the profession.
Accordingly, we applaud the ABA for recognizing that placing strict results-based requirements on law schools that only consider one method of licensure further reinforces a focus on the bar exam. Despite this strength, the proposed changes are far from perfect.
- The Amendment Should not be Adopted as Proposed Due to Concerns about Enforceability, Effectiveness, and Continued Impact on Disabled Law Students and Test Takers.
Crip the Law has several concerns about the language and requirements as proposed. First, the proposed language establishes a requirement that is incredibly vague and, accordingly, difficult to both track and enforce. Tracking bar passage is one thing, but tracking any possible pathway to licensure for any graduate within two years of graduation is a daunting task.
Second, Crip the Law has pre-existing concerns about the strict requirements related to bar passage rates as currently promulgated, which are not addressed with the proposed change in language. Law schools are generally prohibited from engaging in discrimination based on disability or any other protected class. And yet, the ABA’s current requirements encourage discrimination against traditionally underrepresented groups in recruitment and admissions. People of color and people with disabilities who receive accommodations, for example, tend to fare worse on the bar exam.[9] These outcomes are all but guaranteed due to the nature and design of the exam—not the actual talent or competence of test takers with disabilities or other marginalized identities. These proposed changes do not address those concerns, if only because alternative avenues for licensure only truly exist in a handful of states.
If the ABA is to ensure that this language does not discourage law schools from recruiting and admitting students from underrepresented populations, the ABA must leverage its role in the legal profession to incentivize states to adopt diploma privilege or alternative licensure options.
Crip the Law therefore recommends that 1) language establishing a strict 75 percent requirement be eliminated and 2) the ABA actually works toward incentivizing diploma privilege and alternative licensure options, as opposed to making incremental changes like these that simply allow for the possibility.
- Conclusion
In conclusion, Crip the Law supports any and all changes that allow for the adoption of diploma privilege or alternative licensure pathways given the nature of the bar exam and the barriers it presents for disabled test takers. However, Crip the Law recommends that the ABA delete the strict 75 percent requirement and use its position in the profession to catalyze states to permit alternative pathways for licensure. We appreciate your consideration of our comment.
Sincerely,
Marissa Ditkowsky, Esq.
Executive Director, Crip the Law
[1] U.S. Ctrs. for Disease Control and Prevention, Disability Impacts All of Us Infographic, https://www.cdc.gov/disability-and-health/articles-documents/disability-impacts-all-of-us-infographic.html (last updated July 15, 2024).
[2] Marissa Ditkowsky, NDLPA First-of-its-kind Data Analysis Reveals Only 5 Percent of Lawyers Identify as Disabled (Feb. 25, 2025), https://cripthelaw.org/data-reveal-only-5-percent-of-lawyers-identify-as-disabled/.
[3] Nat’l Ass’n of Law Placement, 2025 Report on Diversity in U.S. Law Firms 11, 16, 54 (Mar. 2026), available athttps://www.nalp.org/uploads/2025NALPReportonDiversity.pdf.
[4] See id. at 16.
[5] Haley Moss, Raising the Bar on Accessibility: How the Bar Admissions Process Limits Disabled Law School Graduates, 28:4 Am. U. J. Gender, Soc. Pol’y, & L. 538, 567 (2020).
[6] Nat’l Disability Inst., Nanette Goodman, Michael Morris, & Kelvin Boston, Financial Inequality:
Disability, Race and Poverty in America 12 (2019), available at https://www.nationaldisabilityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/disability-race-poverty-in-america.pdf.
[7] See, e.g., Deborah Jones Merritt & Logan Cornett, Building a Better Bar: The Twelve Building Blocks of Minimum Competence (Dec. 2020), available at https://iaals.du.edu/sites/default/files/documents/publications/building_a_better_bar.pdf.
[8] Milan Markovic, Protecting the Guild or Protecting the Public? Bar Exams and the Diploma Privilege, 35 Geo. J.L. Ethics 163 (2022).
[9] Am. Bar Ass’n, Summary Bar Admission Data: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender (n.d.), https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/statistics/2026/2026-summary-race-ethnicity-gender.pdf (breaking down the results of the 2025 and 2026 bar admission questionnaire); Scott Devito, The Kids Are Definitely Not All Right: An Empirical Study Establishing a Statistically Significant Negative Relationship between Receiving Accommodations in Law School and Passing the Bar Exam, 102 Or. L. Rev. 1 (2023).