Monthly Archives: April 2019

February 2019 Tennessee Bar Results: Vanderbilt, Belmont Maintain Top Spots, Nashville School of Law Last Again

By Daniel A. Horwitz:

The Tennessee Board of Law Examiners has released the results of the February 2019 Tennessee bar exam. The exam—which was taken by 289 prospective lawyers—resulted in an overall passage rate of 46.37%. Special shout out to successful exam-taker Kenny Dyer, whose herculean work as the author’s private investigator on the since re-opened Joseph Webster innocence case cannot be overstated.

Individual school statistics were as follows:

Vanderbilt Law School maintained its multi-year grip on the state’s top spot with an overall passage rate of 83.33% (in a recent previous year, Belmont Law School had claimed the mantle). Tennessee’s other accredited law schools registered overall passage rates of 71.43% (Belmont), 51.43% (Memphis), 47.06% (Duncan), and 43.48% (UT).

Bringing up the rear again, Nashville School of Law—which probably could have benefited from competition from a public law school in Middle Tennessee but was recently protected from it—mustered an overall passage rate of just 30.00%. For context, in 2014, Nashville School of Law secured new leadership and pledged to improve its state-worst passage rate of what was then 65-70%.  Since that time, the school has posted overall passage rates of 50% (February 2015), 28% (July 2015), 30% (February 2016), 28% (July 2016), 35% (February 2017), 38% (July 2017), 13% (February 2018), and 42% (July 2018). Whether BLE Member/former Tennessee Supreme Court Justice William Barker’s definitely genuine concern that “I just hate for people to come spend all the time and money and years of their lives with no possibility of passing” will ever result in him taking action against a non-immigrant remains to be seen.

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Individual Rights Are Expanding In Tennessee

By Daniel A. Horwitz

The past week has been an excellent one for individual rights in Tennessee, with improvements coming in several independent areas:

First, the Tennessee General Assembly has passed the State’s first meaningful anti-SLAPP law to protect Tennesseans’ right to free speech. The reform will instantly have the effect of deterring people from filing baseless lawsuits aimed at censoring critical commentary and severely punishing people who do. Thus, effective July 1, 2019, the Randy Rayburns and Linda Schipanis and Bari Hardins of the world will be able to wield a powerful protective weapon against foolish bad actors’ efforts to censor and intimidate them through frivolous, failed lawsuits.

Second, following a 2017 lawsuit to terminate a White County, Tennessee inmate sterilization program, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has ruled that sterilization-for-sentencing-credits arrangements like White County’s are illegal. “Requiring inmates to waive a fundamental right to obtain a government benefit impermissibly burdens that right” in contravention of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court’s opinion reads. “This decision sends a clear, important message that should never have been necessary in the first place: Inmate sterilization is illegal and unconstitutional,” the inmates’ attorney, Daniel Horwitz (the author), said in a statement to The Tennessean on the ruling.

Third, the Tennessee General Assembly passed one of Governor Bill Lee’s central legislative priorities—a substantial reduction in the current expungement fee that the state assesses people for the privilege of expunging convictions and diverted offenses on their criminal records. Tennessee’s expungement law, which enables people to expunge up to two qualifying convictions, provides an extraordinarily important mechanism for people to move on from an interaction with the criminal justice system and eliminate their criminal record history such that—as a matter of law—it “never occurred.” Although the reform does not wholly eliminate all applicable expungement fees, it reduces the total fee that people will have to pay to expunge a conviction or diversion from $280 to $100 going forward.

These important reforms each move individual rights in the right direction. They reduce private litigants’ ability to abuse the legal process, they curtail the government’s power to infringe upon people’s constitutional rights, and they help ensure that people will not suffer a life sentence for minor criminal convictions solely because they lack the ability to pay a few hundred dollars to expunge their qualifying convictions. Hopefully, progress like this is only a beginning.

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