NCBE and jurisdictions require candidates to take the written bar exam under tightly controlled conditions. These conditions are challenging for lawyers with disabilities: accommodations that they rely upon in the workplace may not be available to them during the written bar exam. Test administrators have an obligation to provide appropriate accommodations during testing, but candidates report that jurisdictions require burdensome and expensive applications to secure accommodations--and that appropriate accommodations are not always available.
Jurisdictions do not publish data about bar success rates of candidates with disabilities. Scott DeVito, however, has gathered data suggesting that those candidates are more likely to fail the bar exam, even after controlling for LSAT scores, college GPAs, and race/ethnicity. DeVito's analyses rely upon institutional, rather than individual, data: He found that law schools that grant more accommodation requests to students have significantly lower bar pass rates than schools granting fewer accommodations (after controlling for the factors mentioned above). Individual-level data would provide more evidence about the relationship between disabilities and bar passage. For now, however, DeVito's analyses provide strong evidence that candidates with disabilities are unfairly disadvantaged by the written bar exam.