The continued spread of COVID-19 has resulted in lawyers across the country working remotely for months on end, including in jurisdictions where they are not licensed to practice law. While this trend prioritizes public health and provides workers with increased flexibility, it could also raise ethical issues for some attorneys.
While there’s significant disagreement on how the bar exam should change, many believe it will, and there’s a wide range of ideas about what should happen.
For attorneys who want to do more pro bono in 2021, here are five ways to get involved.
Throughout the year, the ABA Journal profiles exceptional ABA members in its Members Who Inspire series. In 2020, we featured attorneys from across the country whose important and influential work includes using visual storytelling for legal advocacy, bringing attention to the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women, and combating racial injustice and inequity.
More than 3,000 people who sat for the State Bar of California’s remote October exam had their proctoring videos flagged for review, and dozens report receiving violation notices from the agency’s office of admissions.
Presidents have long used the pardon power in ways that have resulted in outrage and controversy. One of the broadest, yet least-understood clauses in the U.S. Constitution, the pardon power has been the subject of renewed focus and attention, thanks to the parlor game of what President Donald Trump can or cannot do with regards to granting clemency.
Global Tel Link is one of the biggest players in the prison telecommunications industry that connects calls between jail and prison inmates and the outside world. GTL is how Drakeo the Ruler was able to lay down the vocal tracks for his mixtape while he was being held in the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail pending retrial.
After hearing about child care concerns from a campus parent group, the University of New Mexico School of Law School convinced the state in September to change a child care subsidy rule, which until then prohibited eligibility for graduate and postgraduate students.
As of Dec. 3, the five jurisdictions with emergency diploma privilege precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic had announced plans for a remote bar exam in February 2021. None of the jurisdictions has yet released plans for July 2021 admissions, but law school deans in those regions are telling third-year students to plan for a bar exam.
About eight weeks after the first COVID-19 diagnosis in the U.S., the Department of Homeland Security shut down all immigration ports of entry to nonessential travel, including immigrants arriving to the southern border seeking asylum. But even as the border closure put a halt to the flow of people trying to enter the country, it created new challenges for immigration lawyer Tsion Gurmu.
