Kohn v. State Bar of California (Disability Discrimination)
- This campaign seeks assistance paying potential attorney fees to hire suitable disability rights counsel for remand to the District Court, Case No. 4:20-cv-04827-PJH once remanded from the Ninth Circuit, Case No. 20-17316 (case file), should pro bono counsel not be located, and either way, to eventually pay the thousands of dollars per hour required to hire medical expert opinion witnesses and other litigation expenses. While pro bono representation was generously provided on the iteration of appeal that partially overturned the dismissals, current counsel lacks the capacity to expand scope of representation to district court pro bono. Pleading stage representation (e.g., redoing the botched complaint and opposing the next Rule 12(b) motion to dismiss the State Bar will file in the district court) alone would be expected to cost $25,000-60,000 in order to continue with current up-to-speed and suitable counsel presently handling the Ninth Circuit matter. Plaintiff has for years been self-employed at a loss, while facing five-figure annual medical expenses, due to the State Bar's long-term destruction of his employability through the subject discrimination creating a several-year gap from law school graduation to licensure and paying and studying for four attempts at the California bar exam. While donating thousands of hours at great personal cost to this cause, not only through work on pursuing this lawsuit, but also through political activism and legislative lobbying, hundreds of written and spoken public comment submissions for and at State Bar and CA Legislature meetings, and pro bono representation of an applicant's opposition to the State Bar's inadequate Testing Accommodations Rules Revision proposal in the California Supreme Court (S285541), Plaintiff needs and requests assistance from the community funding this advocacy.
- This lawsuit is public interest impact litigation lawsuit challenging not only the State Bar's defiance of a multitude of specialized treating health care experts for its accommodation decisions re: Plaintiff on four different administrations of the California bar exam, but also the State Bar's facially discriminatory procedures for seeking testing accommodations on the California bar exam and its 2020 policy during the pre-vaccine phase of the Covid pandemic to require disabled examinees approved for certain accommodations to unnecessarily test in nonstandard in-person test centers without the Covid mitigations their physicians pleaded for, to spare State Bar staff the burden of adapting exam security methods to those accommodations or providing Covid-safe in-person testing. Although the State Bar has been repeatedly offered settlement for no monetary recovery in exchange for negotiable reforms for future applicants, the State Bar has always flatly refused to discuss such compromises.
- The federal lawsuit opposes the State Bar's challenge to the constitutionality of Title II of the ADA's provision for abrogation of state sovereign immunity, and various other far-reaching precedents detrimental to disability rights being sought by the State Bar.
