On July 30, 2025, Mary Jane Jung went into cardiac arrest in the middle of the New York bar exam. According to her complaint, she lost consciousness and turned blue in front of proctors, staff, and more than 600 other examinees. The exam kept going. According to witnesses, the test didn’t stop until the scheduled lunch break, and then resumed right on time. Jung survived, but alleges she suffered a hypoxic injury, an implanted defibrillator, ongoing memory loss, and cognitive impairment.
She sued Hofstra, where she took the exam. She also filed against the bar examiners, but that was routed to the Court of Claims as a government function. In any event, Hofstra’s moving to dismiss the case on the premise that none of this should be Hofstra’s problem.
According to Bloomberg Law News, the university’s filing argues that since Jung wasn’t a Hofstra student, the school had no relationship with her, and that a landowner’s duty to keep its property reasonably safe doesn’t include a duty to provide first aid for medical emergencies that have nothing to do with the host.
Hofstra hosted a test it didn’t write, didn’t administer, and didn’t make the rules for. Venues have an obligation to make sure they don’t cause anyone harm, they don’t generally owe emergency medical care to every stranger that walks in.
That said, Jung’s complaint doesn’t rest on the idea that Hofstra owed her care generally. She alleges that when Hofstra’s public safety officers showed up, they “failed to promptly call emergency services, failed to promptly administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and failed to timely deploy an automated external defibrillator.” To the extent these alleged failures stemmed from a negligent lack of training or accessibility of equipment, Jung argues that Hofstra failed to maintain a safe venue.
Hofstra argues that it owed her no duty and whatever help it did provide didn’t put her in a worse position. The school might not have owed her a duty, but the three specific allegations Jung makes sure seem as though they present questions of fact as to whether the school made things worse. Maybe they can win those disputes, but it should at least survive this stage of the proceedings.
The case against the Board of Law Examiners raises more troubling allegations. The eyewitness accounts claimed that the folks running the bar exam discouraged others from lending assistance. In Barnes v. Dungan, a 1999 Third Department case, a worker at an animal sanctuary had a heart attack on the job. A CPR-certified coworker offered to help and a supervisor told her not to. The worker died and the court refused to toss the case:
Notably, the complaint alleges that defendants affirmatively prevented Seeley, a coemployee, from administering CPR as opposed to a failure to provide or procure emergency medical assistance
Consider the machine the state built for this test of questionable value. The Board takes everyone’s phones so nobody in the room can call 911, it enforces rules under which standing up is a security event, then it tells 600 people to keep their eyes on their own paper. When someone collapses, everyone’s supposed to keep writing about negligence even if it requires committing it.
The state made its own argument for dismissal replete with adverbs like “entirely,” “demonstrably,” “irrefutably,” and “baselessly.” Whenever adverbs pile up in a filing, it raises red flags as to why the author doesn’t trust their claims without heaping modifiers on top. Off the top, the motion leans on video evidence that the state says disproves all the contemporaneous accounts of staff indifference. But screencaps and the state-provided timeline sure seem like questions for a fact-finder to determine down the road.
Which is probably why the bulk of the filing focuses on immunity because the bar examination “is a critical and quintessential governmental function.”
If you needed any more proof that the bar examination is a suicide pact.
Earlier: Woman Who Went Into Cardiac Arrest During NY Bar Exam Sues Hofstra
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.
The post Hofstra Claims It Has No Duty To Help Bar Examinees Suffering Cardiac Arrest appeared first on Above the Law.
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