Payment Dispute with Emory Prevents Foreign LLM From Sitting For Georgia Bar
The Georgia Supreme Court has held that its Board of Bar Examiners did not abuse its discretion by refusing to certify an applicant’s credentials to sit for the bar examination.
The court denied the petition to waive its foreign LLM education requirements.
Lindsay was educated at De Montfort University in Leicester, United Kingdom and is licensed to practice law in England, Wales, and parts of the Caribbean. In the fall of 2018, she enrolled in an LL.M. program at Emory University School of Law (“Emory”). Following the completion of her LL.M. program, Lindsay sought to apply to take the Georgia Bar Exam.
The problem arose at Emory, where the applicant was “involuntarily withdrawn from a mandatory contracts class for failure to comply with the class attendance policy.”
She filed a grievance but did not prevail
Although [she] was ultimately permitted to register for courses and apparently completed the degree requirements, she continued to withhold payment and a hold was placed on her student account. As a result of the hold, Emory’s Registrar refused to release her official transcript, and she missed the applicable deadline…
She was thus unable to sit for the October 2020 bar exam and here sought a waiver largely premised in Emory’s treatment of her.
In her petition, Lindsay contended that there was good cause to waive the educational requirements due to her legal education and “long years of practical legal service in common law jurisdictions,” and because her inability to obtain an official law school transcript was the result of Emory’s “recalcitrant disregard” for her “civil, human, and constitutional rights.”
The court found no abuse of discretion, declining to “second-guess” the decision of Emory’s Registrar to not release the necessary transcript.
Nor was it an abuse of discretion to not waive that requirement.
we see no abuse of discretion in the Board’s determination that Lindsay’s own assertions about her education and experience are not a proper substitute for the Dean’s letter and thus that Lindsay failed to establish good cause for a waiver of the educational requirements.
(Mike Frisch)
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