NFB Sues Law School Admission Council

NFB Sues Law School Admission Council

The Braille Monitor_______December

1997

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Latonya Phipps

NFB Sues Law School

Admissions Council

From the Editor: On April 4, 1997,

the National Federation of the Blind filed suit against the Law School Admissions

Council (LSAC) on behalf of three blind students. The students (Ross Kaplan,

Latonya Phipps, and Shannon Dillon) argued that the reasonable-accommodations

and equal-access protections afforded disabled people under the Americans with

Disabilities Act had been denied them when they attempted to take the Law School

Admissions Test (LSAT), administered by the Law School Admissions Council.

Kaplan and Phipps were denied the

right to bring trained readers of their own choice with them when they took

the grueling law school entrance examination. LSAC officials insisted that they

use readers assigned by the Council to take the test. Despite the fact that

proctors are always present to insure that no inappropriate communication takes

place between reader and blind student, the LSAC officials maintained that using

readers who were familiar with legal vocabulary and had experience following

the students' instructions constituted a breach of test security.

Dillon was refused the right to use

a Braille writer and paper during the LSAT even though sighted students may

write in the margins of test pages and on blank pages in the test book. She

requested permission to use her Brailler several weeks ahead of the test, but

LSAC officials insisted that she had not done so soon enough.

The lawsuit also argues that the LSAC's

policy of sending a letter to each law school to which a blind student's scores

have been sent invalidates the student's LSAT scores. The letter in question

explains that the blind student took the LSAT in "nonstandard" conditions

and therefore the LSAC cannot predict how accurate an indication the test will

be of the student's ability to do the work in law school. The complaint points

out that blind law graduates have been taking and passing the bar examination

for years without anyone's raising a question about their ability to practice

law merely because they used Braille, readers, large print, or other reasonable

accommodations to take the test.

The April 21, 1997, edition of The

National Law Journal was only one of a number of publications to carry a

story about this suit. The Journal article, written by Joseph Slobodzian,

was the most accurate and comprehensive one that appeared. Here is the story

he wrote:

Blind Test-Takers:

LSAC Failed to Comply with Disabilities Act

Three aspiring pre-law students who said

they were unfairly treated by that grueling rite of passage, the Law School

Admission Test, have shown that, regardless of their scores, they know what

a real lawyer would do.

They sued.

Specifically, the trio sued the Law School

Admissions Council, which administers the test, contending LSAC violated the

federal Americans With Disabilities Act by failing to accommodate the three

students who are blind.

The students--Ross Kaplan of Washington,

D.C.; Latonya Phipps of Atlanta; and Shannon Dillon of Rohnert Park, California--contended

in their suit filed April 4 in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia that all

were top-scoring undergraduates who were sabotaged on the LSAT by the council's

refusal to let them use their own human readers or Braille note-taking equipment.

Forced to take the test without the use of aids, the suit said, all three did

poorly, damaging their chances of being accepted by a top law school. Kaplan

v. LSAC, 97-cv-2350.

The lawsuit was filed in Philadelphia

because the council is located in Newtown, about thirty miles north in Bucks

County, Pennsylvania. Scott C. LaBarre, a lawyer with the National Federation

of the Blind in Denver, who filed the suit with New Hope, Pennsylvania, lawyer

Martin J. King, said he believed the suit was the first challenging a standardized

test for violating the federal disabilities law.

The suit asks for an order to prohibit

LSAC from discriminating against the blind and to let the three students retake

the LSAT at no cost and "free of the discriminatory policies set forth

above." LSAC counsel Joan Vantol said she was prohibited from commenting

on complaints involving individual students or on pending litigation.

The suit says LSAC offers some accommodations

to blind students, such as providing the test in Braille, providing human readers

for the exam, providing the test on cassette tape, and offering the blind additional

time to take the test. But those accommodations do not remedy the hurdles the

test presents to individual blind students, the suit maintains.

Mr. Kaplan, for example, the lawsuit

says, took the LSAT October 5 at American University in Washington, D.C., and

asked the LSAC if he could use his own human reader and a CCTV, a television

device the legally blind use to magnify print.

The council allowed Mr. Kaplan to use

his CCTV but rejected as a security breach his own reader. LSAC said he could

use a council-supplied reader.

The suit says Mr. Kaplan took the test

under protest with an LSAC reader and did "very poorly," scoring a

143, which ranks in the 21.9th percentile of those taking the test.

Mr. LaBarre said the relationship between

a blind person and reader is so individual that using a strange reader is "like

forcing somebody who needs eyeglasses to take the test wearing the wrong pair

of glasses."

Ms. Phipps, for example, took the LSAT

last October at Clark Atlanta University and reluctantly agreed to use an LSAC

reader, who Mr. LaBarre said, was inexperienced with legal terminology and obviously

had never worked with a blind person.

Ms. Dillon, the suit continues, took

the exam last December at the University of California, Hastings College of

Law in San Francisco and sought permission from the LSAC several weeks earlier

to use a Braille typewriter to make notes during the exam, maintaining that

sighted students are allowed to make notes in the margin of the test paper.

The LSAC refused, although it relented when she retook the test earlier this

year.

Mr. LaBarre said the LSAC's refusal to

accommodate the twenty-five to fifty blind students who annually take the LSAT

negated the test's purpose: "It's no longer testing the ability to succeed

in law school. Instead it's trying to find out which blind person can train

and work with a reader on the spur of the moment."

There you have the story as it appeared

in April. The case is now scheduled to go to trial in late December. Depositions

are currently being taken, so, assuming that no postponements take place--always

a large assumption--we can hope for an early decision in this matter.