Mary Jane Jung

The proctors said keep writing.

We have all had bad exam days.

Some of you sat for the bar in a freezing convention center in July, wearing a hoodie you borrowed from a stranger, wondering if the examiners were cryogenically preserving you for future study. Some of you wrote the PCLL conversion exams in Hong Kong and emerged three hours later with the handwriting of a doctor and the soul of a ghost. Some of you failed the first time and told everyone you “didn’t really prepare” when in fact you prepared so hard your family filed a missing persons report.

Case Study

None of you had it as bad.

None of you had it as bad as Mary Jane Jung.

On July 30, 2025, Ms. Jung sat down at Hofstra University to take the New York bar exam. Roughly 600 candidates in a giant hall. Proctors patrolling the aisles like hall monitors at the end of civilization. Pens moving. Dreams on the line. The usual anxiety, the usual silence, the usual quiet terror of a profession that begins by making you prove you can suffer.

At about 12:20 p.m., Ms. Jung began gasping for air and crying out in distress. She then lost consciousness, collapsed onto the floor of the examination hall, and turned blue.

Not metaphorically blue. Not “feeling blue.” Blue.

The color a human being turns when oxygen stops reaching the brain.

This happened in full view of proctors, staff, and hundreds of candidates. The signs of cardiac arrest were, in the complaint’s understated phrasing, “unmistakable.”

Several candidates tried to help. One waved his hand in the air and urgently requested that emergency services be contacted. This is what a normal person does when another person is dying in front of them. It is, in fact, what the law expects a reasonable person to do.

Official Response

The proctors had a different view.

The proctors had a different view.

They told everyone to sit down and keep writing. Candidates who tried to stand up or move toward the scene were discouraged from doing so. At least one candidate who attempted to assist Ms. Jung was admonished. A woman lay unconscious and cyanotic on the floor of a room full of future officers of the court, and the official position of the State of New York was: “Please return to Question 4.”

No one called 911. No one performed CPR. No one retrieved the AED that was, according to the complaint, available in the building and required by New York law in large public facilities. The examination session continued. Ms. Jung lay on the floor, unconscious, turning blue, without medical intervention, while 600 people around her wrote essays about the duty of care.

Six hundred people writing about the duty of care while a woman dies on the floor.

Let that sit for a moment.

In fairness, several candidates did try to help. The ones who kept their heads down and kept writing will make excellent insurance defense lawyers.

Emergency responders were not admitted to the examination hall until after the session ended.

Following the incident, examination personnel informed candidates that Ms. Jung was “okay.” Ms. Jung was, in fact, not okay. Ms. Jung suffered cardiac arrest accompanied by hypoxic brain injury. She has since been diagnosed with ventricular fibrillation, had a defibrillator implanted in her chest, and been referred for neurological evaluation due to persistent cognitive symptoms including memory loss. Her attorneys at Aidala, Bertuna & Kamins filed a verified claim in the New York Court of Claims on July 29, 2026, bringing causes of action for negligence and negligent training and supervision.

Meanwhile

Washington managed a farce.

For those of you who went the PCLL route in Hong Kong, congratulations, you picked the path where at least the inhumanity is distributed across two years of articles instead of concentrated into one afternoon.

And if you think New York has cornered the market on bar exam catastrophe, you have not been paying attention to Washington State. Two days before Jung’s complaint was filed, 645 aspiring lawyers showed up at the Yakima Convention Center on July 28, 2026 to sit for the brand-new NextGen bar exam, an eight-year, multimillion-dollar project by the National Conference of Bar Examiners that was supposed to modernize legal licensure for the digital age. The Wi-Fi collapsed under the weight of 645 people logging on at the same time. Candidates sat for hours staring at frozen screens. The proctors tried a lunch break. Lunch did not fix the Wi-Fi. They canceled the entire exam. The NCBE then issued a statement calling the platform launch “a historic milestone in legal licensure,” which is true in the same way that the maiden voyage of the Titanic was a historic milestone in transatlantic travel.

So here is the state of American legal licensure in the summer of 2026: In New York, a woman filed a lawsuit after she went into cardiac arrest during the bar exam and the proctors told everyone to keep writing. In Washington, 645 people could not take the bar exam at all because the Yakima Convention Center’s internet connection buckled under the digital weight of the NextGen platform the way a folding table buckles under a third-year associate’s student loans. And the organizations responsible would like you to know that everything is going according to plan.

What Stays

He raised his hand.

But here is the part that stays with me.

Somewhere in that hall at Hofstra, a candidate looked up from an essay question about negligence and saw a woman on the floor, not breathing, turning blue. And that candidate did what any decent person would do. He raised his hand. He waved it. He asked someone, anyone, to call for help.

And he was told to sit down.

That is not a failure of protocol. That is not a gap in training. That is a system telling a room full of human beings that the rules matter more than the person lying on the floor. That the process is more sacred than the life it is supposed to serve.

Every one of us became a lawyer because we believed, at some point, that the law exists to protect people. That when systems fail, the law steps in. That when institutions look away, the law does not.

Ms. Jung’s claim seeks compensatory damages to be determined at trial. I hope she gets them. But more than that, I hope the candidate who raised his hand and was told to sit down remembers something for the rest of his career. He was right. The proctors were wrong. And no exam, no credential, no license, no institution is more important than the person next to you who cannot breathe.

That is not on the bar exam.

But it should be.