The Tennessee Court of Workers’ Compensation Claims says it will continue to proceed with its plan to hold in-person settlements beginning this month but with “a broad caveat.” The court now says it will be up to local judges, the employee and their counsel, and the employer and their counsel to make a collective judgement about how to proceed. Bottom line? The court says to call the office where an in-person settlement is sought to see if it can be safely arranged.

Two federal judges have blocked President Joe Biden's vaccine mandate for the Head Start program within the past few days. Louisiana Judge Terry Doughty blocked the mandate in 24 states — including Tennessee — while Judge James "Wesley" Hendrix issued an almost identical ruling in Texas, Knoxnews reports. Doughty's ruling said the Biden administration failed to provide proper notice and public comment period for the order and does not have the power to issue the mandate without congressional authority. It was Doughty's second injunction against a Biden vaccine mandate. He earlier blocked a requirement for health care workers.  Tennessee Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III joined the multi-state lawsuit on Dec. 21.

The state has asked a federal judge to halt his previous order on masks in schools while a newly filed appeal is pending in a higher court, the Tennessean reports. Last Thursday, attorneys for the state filed a motion in federal court asking U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw to delay implementing his Dec. 10 order, which blocked a new state law that would prevent schools from issuing mask mandates and strip local health and school officials of their ability to set COVID-19 quarantine policies. Crenshaw had blocked the state ban on mask mandates at the request of parents seeking to protect students with disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The state argues that existing disability accommodation laws provide enough protection for students and the law in question allows for individual ADA accommodations.

A report published by the Tennessee Justice Center (TJC) yesterday says Tennessee ranks 20th in the nation for number of state inmates infected with COVID-19 per capita, WSMV reports. According to statistics in the report, as of July, one in every 515 state prisoners who contract the virus had died and one in every 300 staff members who tested positive have died. TJC says COVID-19 poses a unique challenge for prisons due to the close confinement, restricted access to personal protective equipment, overstretched health services and more. In the report, TJC recommended that lawmakers consider meaningful healthcare reform to meet the needs of those behind bars. “As with so many systems, COVID-19 has laid bare the inequities and challenges that have long existed for some of the most vulnerable Tennesseans,” Just City Memphis Executive Director Josh Spickler said.

Technical glitches plagued many bar exams in 2021 after roughly 30 states were forced to administer the test remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Bloomberg Law reports. Test takers reported computer crashes, being locked out of the exam or being wrongly flagged for cheating. The chaos prompted a National Conference of Bar Examiners task force to issue recommendations for a new bar exam that better reflects “real-world practice and the types of activities newly-licensed lawyers perform.” While those recommendations were approved by the examiners, they will take four to five years to be enacted. After the 2021 exams, states are determined to return to in-person testing, but with the omicron variant causing a spike in infection rates, states could possibly be forced to improvise again.

Tennessee Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III has joined a multi-state lawsuit challenging the Biden administration’s recent mask requirements for toddlers and COVID-19 vaccinations for staff and volunteers in Head Start Programs. The states allege that the mandate goes beyond the executive branch’s authority and violates laws that require notice and comment times for proposed executive actions.

A U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit panel on Monday denied the Knox County School Board’s request to pause a mask requirement while litigation on the issue makes its way through the courts, the Associated Press reports. U.S. District Judge J. Ronnie Greer had ruled in September that the school system must adopt a mask mandate to help protect children with health problems that make them more susceptible to the coronavirus pandemic. The school system had offered remote learning as an alternative to those with health concerns, but both courts said they were “not persuaded that virtual schooling is a reasonable alternative to universal masking.” The school system did not adopt a mask policy for the 2021-2022 school year. Parents of children with health concerns challenged that decision.

Law schools are racing to confront and embrace new COVID-19 safety measures as coronavirus cases spike around the country, Reuters report. At least three law schools pushed final exams online this week after their universities announced campus closures tied to COVID-19. Cornell University shut down its Ithaca, New York, campus this week halfway through the law school’s nine-day finals period. New York University and George Washington University, each citing the fast spread of COVID-19, quickly followed. All three universities require students to be vaccinated against COVID-19 to be on campus, but each has reported a rise in the Omicron variant among their recorded cases.

The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today that it will hear consolidated challenges to the Biden Administration’s vaccine mandate for private businesses with more than 100 employees first by a three judge panel. Opponents of the mandate had pushed for the full court to hear the cases. In its ruling today, the court said it had received several petitions for an initial hearing to be conducted en banc but a majority of the judges on the court did not support that approach. 

A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals today reinstated the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health care workers in 26 states, saying the lower court did not have authority to apply its stay nationwide but only to the 14 states that had sued: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah and West Virginia. The administration’s mandate requires that health care facilities vaccinate staff against the coronavirus or lose funding from the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which administers two large government health care programs. Yahoo News has the story from Reuters.