Judge’s Ruling Protects Bar Applicants' Personal Information, 1216 CABARJ, CBJ - December 2016 #04
| Author | Laura Ernde, Staff Writer. |
Laura Ernde, Staff Writer.
The State Bar won’t be required to release bar applicants’ personal information – including race, law school grade-point average, LSAT and bar exam scores, a judge ruled last month.
The San Francisco County Superior Court ruling, which affirmed the bar’s decision to protect applicants’ individually identifiable personal information for privacy reasons, could put an end to eight years of litigation brought against the State Bar by UCLA law professor Richard Sander and others who sought 36 years of detailed information to conduct research on law school admissions practices.
“The bar is committed to protecting the individual privacy interests of all applicants who take the bar exam,” said Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, executive director of the State Bar of California.
The ruling found that releasing the sensitive, personal information of applicants in this case would have “real, personal consequences for State Bar applicants” because it could inadvertently identify individuals and that “non-disclosure of the data protects the general public from the adverse consequences of disclosure.”
The State Bar has opposed releasing the data, arguing it violates the commitment made to law students regarding privacy and the bar’s limited use of their records and personal information. No other state bar has released this kind of data.
Judge Mary E. Wiss ruled in the bar’s favor, citing a number of factors including privacy protections and a new provision that was added to the State Bar Act in 2016 saying that admissions records are confidential and shall not be released.
Sander’s legal team had proposed several protocols for releasing the data without identifying individuals, but Wiss found that there would still be a risk of matching individuals with bar exam scores, race and other information. In addition, she found that the protocols called for creation of new records from the data, which the bar is not required to do under the California Public Records Act.
Intervenors in the lawsuit included Black Women Lawyers...
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