Legal Uncertainties: COVID-19, Distance Learning, Bar Exams, and the Future of U.S. Legal Education

The COVID-19 pandemic forced the U.S. legal academy and legal profession to make changes to legal education and training very rapidly in order to accommodate the needs of students, graduates, practitioners, clients, and the public. Like most of the public, members of the profession assumed that most, if not all, of the changes would be temporary, and life would return to a pre-pandemic normal. These assumed temporary changes included a rapid and massive shift to online teaching for legal education, to online administration of the bar exam in some jurisdictions, or the option to offer the diploma privilege in others. Many employers made efforts to accommodate new law graduates and employees who needed to work from home. As legal educators and the legal profession shift back to ‘normal’, we are now discovering that some of these changes might be rather desirable. Thus, we can begin to look at the last two years as an opportunity to re-evaluate how we teach and learn law and how we might evaluate the competence of those entering the profession in different ways. As we move forward, instead of automatically readopting to the status quo, we can instead examine approaches that would allow us to make headway on solving problems that have been with us for decades