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Abstract: On the path to legal licensure, disability is not accommodated – it is constantly re-litigated. While twenty percent of first-year law students report having a disability, only 3.06% of law-firm lawyers and only 5.4% of ABA members do. That delta is not about talent; it is about a licensure pipeline that makes access non-portable. At each gate, from LSAT to law school to the MPRE, and finally to the bar exam, students must re-prove their impairments with increasing documentation requirements and shorter appeal windows, some of which are measured in days. The result is predictable: increased costs, added stress and delay, chilled disclosure, and selective attrition. Fragmentation also manufactures stigma: by forcing serial proof of “deservedness,” it entrenches ableist assumptions about special treatment and drives silence even among candidates who have long relied on accommodations. The NextGen UBE arrives heralding uniform content, administration, scoring, and portability, yet leaves accommodations to individual jurisdictions, undermining the exam’s promised validity and reliability. The hidden costs are profession-wide: clients with disabilities face deeper justice gaps, employers lose proven talent, and the public loses confidence in a bar that filters by access rather than ability. This Article maps the fragmentation, shows how it erodes score meaning and equity, and offers concrete fixes: portable accommodations to match portable scores, shared documentation and evaluator standards, early bar-exam accommodations windows, and transparent reporting. It also highlights emerging portfolio and apprenticeship pathways that build access in from the start. The choice is simple: keep a pipeline that tests endurance – or build one that measures lawyering.
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