Statue of Edward Douglas White at the Louisiana Supreme Court building in New Orleans.

Louisiana has become the fourth jurisdiction to adopt an emergency diploma privilege that will enable recent law graduates to skip the bar exam.

The Supreme Court of Louisiana on Wednesday issued an order allowing graduates of American Bar Association-accredited law school to be licensed in the state without taking the bar exam, citing the upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

"This COVID-19 crisis is unprecedented, and it calls for unprecedented and bold action, including implementation of today's Order granting one-time emergency admission to the Bar with additional requirements," Chief Justice Bernette Joshua Johnson said in an announcement Wednesday. "This pandemic, not experienced globally since the 1918 Spanish Flu, has caused absolute disruption not only to the legal profession but to every aspect of society, with serious illness prevalent, schools shuttered nationally since March, unemployment at record high rates, and rising infection rates."

Louisiana joins Utah, Washington and Oregon in adopting an emergency diploma privilege. Wisconsin has had a longstanding diploma privilege system for graduates of the state's two law schools.

Louisiana had planned to offer a one-day bar exam on July 27 both in-person and online, but canceled both tests on July 15—just 12 days before they were to take place. (It also planned for a second in-person and online exam in October.) That decision left July's would-be test takers wondering how they would be licensed. The court's embrace of a one-time diploma privilege is a major relief, said Kelly Gismondi, a May graduate of Loyola University New Orleans School of Law who was slated to take the in-person exam next week.

"We're all in shock," she said minutes after the court issued its order. "At this point, everyone is frankly relieved. We put in the hard work. We studied up until 12 days before the exam was supposed to be administered under the pretense we were taking the bar exam. We did nine straight weeks of 8-hours-a-day, every day study, like you would for a normal bar exam. When we were told last week that the Louisiana Supreme Court had canceled the administration of the July in-person bar, it was scary because so many of us are depending on licensure as a way to make money. We were most fearful of delaying to a later bar exam."

In order to qualify for Louisiana's emergency diploma privilege, people must be first-time bar exam takers who graduated from an ABA-accredited law school since December of 2019. They must also complete 25 hours of continuing legal education and the state bar's Transition into Practice Program. In 2019, Louisiana had 503 people take its July bar exam, with 429 of them being first-time takers. The pass rate among those first-time takers was 75%. Louisiana now plans to offer the one-day online version of the bar on both August 24 and October 10, which will be available to repeat test takers and any others who don't fit the criteria established for the diploma privilege.

According to the court, it's not the first time it has temporarily suspended the requirement that new attorneys pass the bar exam. Certain candidates were exempt from the exam in the 1950s during the Korean Conflict, it said.

The court's decision was not unanimous. Three of the six judges dissented from the order establishing the emergency diploma privilege. (One of the seven seats on the court is currently vacant.)

"If anything, removing the sole competency filter for admission to the practice of law will create an emergency, not eliminate one," wrote Justice William Crain in his dissent, which noted that the state still mandated the bar exam in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. "The bar examination acts to protect the public from basic incompetency."

Gismondi said she plans to take the diploma privilege option, but expects some attorneys to be skeptical of her and her classmates who go that route.

"I know we will face criticism from established attorneys who think we shouldn't be granted a license without taking the bar," she said. "I can see, from their perspective, how it might seem that we are getting off easy. But the reality is that we were told, 'There's a global pandemic. People in your community are dying. There's a social uprising. And you need to study for the bar anyway.' And you know what? We did. In a lot of ways, we're more qualified than any class before or after us in terms of emotional intelligence. We have learned how to overcome adversity."