Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I'm Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I'll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

I hope everyone had a relaxing Fourth of July weekend. This week, I'm sharing my take on two of the biggest issues in legal education at the moment: The bar exam and how best to resume classes in the fall. Florida's last-minute cancelation of the in-person July bar exam holds lesson for administrators deciding whether to go fully remote in the fall, or attempt to offer some in-person classes. Plus, I'm checking in on Rehan Station, who will be making the switch this fall from sanitation worker to Harvard Law 1L. Who says there's no good news right now?

Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at [email protected] or on Twitter: @KarenSloanNLJ

Bar Exam Blunders

I can't say that I'm surprised that officials in Florida on July 1 canceled the upcoming bar exam, which was slated to take place in-person in a mere four weeks. It was clearly a bad idea to cram more than a thousand people into testing sites in Tampa and Orlando at a time when the Sunshine State is reporting upwards of 6,000 new COVID-19 cases per day. But I have to take the state's bar examiners to task for their poor handling of the exam from the get go, which has created a massive amount of unnecessary anxiety for examinees. They have been studying for a traditional bar exam for weeks now under extremely challenging circumstances, and it is undoubtedly a shock to have the date and format of the all-important licensing test changed so abruptly. The Florida test will now be a one-day online exam given August 19 (the original date bar examiners set was August 18, but that had to be changed too, after they realized that was Florida's Primary Day.)

Let me put this another way: I think Florida ended up in the right place, but the path there was badly mismanaged. I also think the drama over the Florida bar exam should be taken as a cautionary tale by law schools that are determining how to proceed in the fall. In a nutshell, the state's bar examiners in early May opted to hew closely to the traditional bar exam playbook—they did add a second testing site and announced precautions such as required masks and social distancing—in the hopes that the COVID-19 situation would improve rather than deteriorate. They made plans based on a best-case-scenario rather than a worst-case one, which is the start of where they went wrong.

In fairness to Florida, it's not the only jurisdiction where officials are making last-minute decisions and reversals on attorney licensing. We've got Washington and Oregon announcing emergency diploma privileges in the fourth quarter, while Washington D.C., Maryland, and Massachusetts are moving to online October tests after candidates made plans for in-person September exams. And both Tennessee and Texas followed Florida last week in canceling their in-person July bars. But Florida stands out as the worst offender on this, so far, given that it plowed ahead with a July test before canceling less than a month out and that, unlike Texas and Tennessee, did not have back up September test dates on the books.

The Fall Semester Conundrum

The bar situation in Florida sets the stage nicely for another matter that has been on my mind lately: How law schools are approaching the decision on whether or not to try to hold classes on campus amid so much COVID-19 uncertainty. I don't envy law school administrators who have to balance the interest of students who so badly want to be on campus with the health of their entire academic communities and the uncertainty of the pandemic. But I will say that my thinking on this has shifted in recent weeks, partly due to the aforementioned whiplash of bar exam decisions. Mid-June, I would have said that I appreciate the effort many law schools are making to give students, 1Ls in particular, at least some element of in-person instruction. (You can read my latest story on the approaches law schools are taking to the fall here.) I now agree with Northwestern law professor Dan Rodriguez, who wrote a recent PrawfsBlawg post arguing that instead of contorting through the many hoops central universities and local health officials have created for in-person classes, law schools should commit their resources and what remains of the summer to delivering the best possible online education for students.

I know that's a bit controversial, but I think law schools should do what the Florida Board of Bar Examiners did not: Make plans based on the worst-case scenario. There surely is a cost to committing to a fully online fall: Among them are the student relationships that develop through in-person interaction and the chance that some incoming students will defer or rethink law school altogether. But I believe that there is a lot of value in certainty—certainty for incoming and current students deciding whether or not to move for the start of the school year, certainty for faculty and staff who want to be there for students but who are concerned about their health. The fear is that students will gear up for a return to the classroom, only to find out with little notice that it won't happen after all. It seems likely that classes will have to switch fully online at some point in the fall due to COVID-19, and that disruption won't be seamless.

If professors spend the summer developing more creative approaches to online teaching than simply lecturing over Zoom, my bet is that will prove more effective than starting an in-person class then abruptly moving online mid-semester. I realize that most every law school at this point is allowing students to take their classes online, but I think it's even harder to design and pull off a good class that is simultaneously serving students in the classroom and at home. A growing number of law schools are making that tough call. Among them: Harvard; Berkeley, Connecticut; Vermont; Cooley; Ave Maria; and CUNY. I suspect that list will growing in the coming weeks.

From Garbage Hauler to Harvard 1L

It's not all doom and gloom out there on the law school front, I promise! A video of 24-year-old Rehan Station opening his acceptance email from Harvard Law School made the Internet rounds last week, and it's easy to see why it resonated with people. You see, Station worked for years hauling trash and cleaning out dumpsters for a Maryland sanitation company, at times while juggling college at the University of Maryland. Despite the hurdles life threw his way—he struggled as a child after his mother left the country and his father worked multiple jobs to support him and his brother—he persevered and pushed forward with his dream to go to law school.

The video shows Station at home with his brother in March, nervous to open the email from Harvard that contained his fate. His excitement when he reads that opening "Congratulations" definitely put a smile on my face. I also love that on the wall of the family's living room are the logos of the eight law schools he applied to. His brother tapes a thumbs up to the Harvard logo as Station runs off camera to tell his dad the news. (According to the Washington Post, which interviewed Station, he was also accepted to Columbia; Penn, USC and Pepperdine, and waitlisted at UCLA; Georgetown; Berkeley and NYU.) Props to Harvard for embracing Station's non-traditional resume, and I have to say it's worked out great for the Cambridge law school as well. They got an unexpected bump of positive publicity out of it in addition to a promising new student…

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I'll be back next week with more news and updates on the future of legal education. Until then, keep in touch at [email protected]