By Anna Jessurun, ACLU Legal Intern

After three grueling years of law school, aspiring attorneys have one last hurdle to overcome in order to practice law: the bar exam. In normal times, the bar exam is daunting, as the multi-day test determines the professional fates of lawyers-to-be. This year, with the COVID-19 pandemic raging, the bar exam has gone from being unnecessarily burdensome to unnecessarily deadly.

Some states have granted bar admission to graduates of accredited law schools — a policy known as “diploma privilege.” But others are plowing ahead with exams — in-person or remote, on time or delayed. The policies and procedures for these exams are in constant flux. And the civil rights and civil liberties issues presented by this year’s bar exams are extensive.
This year, states are limiting law grads’ access to menstrual products and opportunities to pump breastmilk during the bar exam. This policing of when someone can change their tampon or if and when someone can pump raises serious sex discrimination concerns. 

Take the West Virginia bar exam, for example. “Feminine hygiene products” are explicitly prohibited in the testing room. Instead, the West Virginia Board of Law Examiners (WVBLE) requires those who are menstruating go to proctors to retrieve tampons or pads during the all-day exam. In response to rightful confusion from West Virginia bar examinees, the WVBLE has since stated that “there is no prohibition on bringing menstrual products to the test,” but it remains unclear if test takers can have the products with them in the testing room or not. 

Montana’s policy is even worse: Menstrual hygiene products are not included in the list of permitted items (although “medical items” are allowed), and the exam instructions do not otherwise indicate that these products will be provided to test-takers. And in Nebraska, one examinee was told that she needed permission in order to change her tampon more often than every two hours.

The notion that anyone can use a tampon to cheat would be laughable if it weren’t being used to disadvantage menstruating test-takers. In any event, other states have allowed examinees to bring menstrual products into exam rooms for years without incident.

States are also putting up unnecessary roadblocks for test-takers who are lactating. For example, administrators in Oklahoma refused to extend the 15-minute break for one woman to pump, even though that isn’t nearly enough time to prepare the equipment, pump, and clean and sanitize the equipment. Sadly, this problem isn’t unique to the pandemic: exam administrators have long created roadblocks for menstruating and breastfeeding test takers. But this creates further barriers to new parents entering the legal profession who are already facing an unprecedented lack of childcare.

Blocking access to menstrual products and opportunities to pump breastmilk during the bar exam is also a gender equity issue. First, more often than not, menstrual products are placed in women’s restrooms only. Failing to provide menstrual products in facilities that are accessible to everyone who needs them, including some transmen and non-binary people, leaves some test takers with no access to necessary products at all.

Also, what products will be provided? Menstruation is different for everybody, and those who menstruate know the products that work best for them. Not to mention the privacy concerns raised by needing to disclose personal medical information to proctors. Test takers who are breastfeeding are similarly negatively affected when exam administrators refuse to allow them to safely express breastmilk during the exam at an appropriate time and place, effectively preventing many new parents from sitting for the bar.

Bar examiners should be working to make the legal profession more accessible to those who already face barriers to success in the legal profession — including women, trans and non-binary people, and new parents — not less. Fortunately, some states have already reversed course in response to public outcry. But it shouldn’t take going viral on Twitter for all students to be able to sit for the bar exam in safety and dignity.

By Somil Trivedi, ACLU Senior Staff Attorney & Andrea Woods, ACLU Staff Attorney

The recent spikes in COVID-19 cases across the country are a stark reminder that the pandemic is still very much with us. As John Oliver recently noted, nowhere is that more true than in jails and prisons. The top five clusters of cases in America, and eight of the top 10, are in corrections facilities. The reason is simple: Most law enforcement officials, judges, and lawmakers have been unwilling to use their capital to protect these apparently expendable human beings — even though doing so will protect all of us and help eradicate the virus faster. In other words, politics and fear have trumped public health and the Constitution, and now we’re all worse off.
 
In response to the pandemic, the ACLU has embarked on one of the largest legal and advocacy mobilizations in our history. Alongside our affiliates and partners, we have filed over 30 lawsuits and pressed advocacy in every state to release vulnerable detainees and force officials to implement social distancing, augment hygienic practices, and expand testing. By many accounts, we are winning. In response to these suits, officials have improved conditions inside and done so faster than they would have otherwise. This has unquestionably saved lives and slowed the spread of the virus.
 
For example, we sued Oakdale Federal Correctional Institution in Louisiana — where five men died in the two weeks before filing — and forced the Bureau of Prisons to accelerate its review of medically vulnerable prisoners for home confinement. When that effort failed and cases continued to spike, the warden was fired. Across the federal prison system, we have exposed Attorney General Bill Barr and his BOP’s sluggish, cruel response to the pandemic, extracting improved conditions, teeing up compassionate release petitions, and spurring a Congressional investigation.
 
We also sued the Dallas County Jail for failing to protect incarcerated people from a rapidly-spreading COVID-19 outbreak. Immediately after we filed, people living and working at the jail described a “scurry of activity,” once jail officials realized their actions would come under scrutiny. Masks were distributed for the first time, sanitation measures adopted, and soap and hand sanitizer provided. We elicited testimony revealing that county officials were refusing to release sick people even after they had paid their bail, and successfully pressed for their release upon uncovering this practice.  
 
In Memphis, Tennessee, we sued the Shelby County Jail a day after jail officials forced dozens of people who had tested positive for COVID-19 back into general housing, and pepper sprayed those who protested the move out of what they felt was a moral obligation not to infect others. While the case is ongoing, the jail has been ordered to undergo an independent inspection and produce a list of the many medically-vulnerable people it is incarcerating in the midst of this deadly pandemic.
 
Despite these victories, not all judges have risen to the occasion. For example, the federal prison at Butner, North Carolina houses some of the sickest and most COVID-vulnerable people in the federal system. By mid-June, 21 people were dead and more than 600 had tested positive. The judge called these numbers “tragic,” and yet held that they were somehow not proof that the prison had acted unconstitutionally — even though one of the leading Supreme Court cases in this arena requires wardens to prevent the spread of communicable disease. There are now 26 dead at Butner, including one staff member. In another case, a federal court of appeals even ruled that it was too harmful to the jail to require officials to provide soap and disinfecting supplies to incarcerated people, because the county may feel it is better to divert those supplies elsewhere. And in the Oakdale case mentioned above, a federal judge ultimately ruled against the prisoners in part because he was afraid of becoming a “superwarden” of the facility.
 
These and other judges have defied public health consensus and denied the limited remedy of temporary release. Some of those who even considered release down the road have been promptly reversed or stayed, including by the U.S. Supreme Court.
 
These disappointing decisions on the question of detainee release highlight two fundamental problems. First, lawmakers have deliberately stripped incarcerated people of the ability to have their day in court through procedural barriers such as the Prison Litigation Reform Act and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Both laws make it much more difficult for incarcerated people to seek release from unlawful imprisonment. Second, judges have placed unjustified faith in the machinery of incarceration and deferred to officials who, for far too long, have subjected our clients to inhumane conditions out of plain sight.
 
Together, these factors allow judges tasked with the difficult work of evaluating these cases to adopt a hands-off approach to enforcing the law, and to avoid facing the tragic reality of mass incarceration during a pandemic. The truth is that our clients are being subjected to unconscionable conditions and are unable to keep themselves safe. They and their loved ones are terrified, and the Constitution requires judges to protect them.
 
This reticence to do what is right — this state-sanctioned relegation of human bodies, especially Black bodies, to death and disease — is not specific to COVID-19 and cannot be assessed in a vacuum. Unfortunately, we have long had a legal system fueled by structural racism that devalues “violent convicts” (never mind that many are neither violent nor convicted). At every turn, our system is animated by the dehumanization and criminalization of people, particularly people of color. This gives cover to judges when they fail to grant meritorious COVID-19 emergency requests. This enables prosecutors to bring aggressive and unnecessary charges against people to coerce them into pleading guilty instead of exercising their right to trial.
 
Most recently, this racism and subverting of humanity led to a Minneapolis police officer to crush George Floyd’s windpipe and kill him. It allowed an Attorney General to kneecap the federal consent decrees that attempt to prevent such killings. It allowed white vigilantes to hunt down Ahmaud Arbury on a jog. This same racism and inhumanity allowed a future president to call for the death penalty for five innocent Black boys in Central Park. And it allowed our jails and prisons to fill up with 2.2 million people in the first place, making them so crowded and filthy that COVID-19 will always be a problem — unless judges, jailers, police, prosecutors, and politicians are forced to confront this systemic human devaluation head on. 
 
This fight to prevent people from dying of COVID-19 in jails and prisons is just one urgent component of the broader movement to end mass incarceration, over-policing, and state-sanctioned anti-Black violence. This work in and out of the courts — including in Congress, in statehouses nationwide, and at the ballot box — must continue until no human life is treated as expendable by our governments.

By Adriel I. Cepeda Derieux, ACLU Senior Staff Attorney, Voting Rights Project

As the movement for D.C. statehood gains undeniable momentum, anxious cries from its detractors are reaching a fever pitch. Following the House of Representatives’ recent approval of the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, H.R. 51, which would finally grant statehood and full voting representation in Congress to over 700,000 people living in our nation’s capital, critics emerged in the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, and elsewhere to wring their hands over the alleged “partisan advantage” that statehood would bring. Further, they argued, D.C. statehood can only spring from a constitutional amendment.

This focus on the potential partisan leaning of the new state’s federal delegation misses the point: D.C. statehood would correct an overt act of racial voter suppression with roots in the Reconstruction era. In 1867, President Andrew Johnson vetoed a bill granting adult citizens of the District — including Black men — the right to vote. Congress overrode the veto, granting significant political influence to Black Washingtonians. But just as Black voters started to exercise their power, Congress replaced D.C.’s territorial government with three presidentially appointed commissioners.

The goal of that move was obvious: disenfranchising an increasingly politically active Black community. As Sen. John Tyler Morgan of Alabama explained in 1890, after “the negroes came into this district,” it became necessary to “deny the right of suffrage entirely to every human being.” As he put it more simply, and shamefully: It was necessary to “burn down the barn to get rid of the rats.” 

In one cautionary opinion piece, attorneys David Rivkin and Lee Casey raise some policy concerns against the House bill. But their stated arguments are not constitutional barriers. Relying on Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s 1964 memo opposing D.C. statehood, the authors conclude that “abolishing the permanent seat of the federal government would be a profound change — the sort that can be accomplished only with a national consensus implemented through a constitutional amendment.” But H.R. 51 does not abolish the national capital — it only shrinks it, making a new state out of most of the resized District’s surrounding areas.

Congress can do this, because the Framers knew how to say what they meant. They gave Congress authority to “exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever” over the District, stating only that it could not be larger than ten square miles. That sweeping authority includes the power to shrink the District to less than its current size. As Viet Dinh, Assistant Attorney General under President Bush, explained to Congress in 2014, Kennedy’s policy concern “is just that: a policy concern,” and would not override a constitutional act of Congress.

There’s no better proof that the Framers meant to give Congress the power to shrink the District’s boundaries than the fact that it immediately did so after the District was first established. Congress gave back most of Arlington and Alexandria to Virginia in 1846. But the first Congress also changed the District’s configuration in 1791, less than four years after the Constitutional Convention. This bolsters the constitutionality of the House bill, because, as the Supreme Court said in Marsh v. Chambers (1983), acts of the first Congress offer “contemporaneous and weighty evidence” of the Framers’ intent. And when the court addressed the 1846 retrocession in Phillips v. Payne (1875), it strongly hinted that Congress had vast authority over the District’s boundaries, saying the case involved “action of the political departments” that “bound” the courts.

Nor does the House bill violate the Twenty-Third Amendment, which gives the District of Columbia three votes in the Electoral College. That amendment would lead to a curious result: It would give the few residents of the smaller, reshaped national capital outsized influence in presidential elections. But there’s no constitutional conflict between the House bill and the Twenty-Third Amendment. As Viet Dinh explained, “the Constitution is not violated anytime the factual assumptions underlying a provision change.” Indeed, the Amendment gives the current District three — and only three — Electoral College votes even if its population somehow quadrupled tomorrow, and the bill provides an expedited process for removing those three electors. And importantly, as noted by Rivkin and Casey, the House-passed bill establishes expedited procedures for the House and Senate to repeal the Twenty-Third Amendment.

Critics continue to ignore the essential argument in favor of statehood: ending the continued disenfranchisement of a non-minority Black jurisdiction that has left hundreds of thousands of Americans without representation in Congress. They also overlook the fact that in 2016, almost 80 percent of D.C. voters supported statehood in a referendum.

Admitting a new state will always have political implications. That’s why the Framers fully left the matter to Congress’s discretion. Rivkin and Casey are right that D.C. statehood would be a “profound change,” —  a profound, constitutionally viable change — that would bring our country one step forward to an inclusive democracy.