Court to Rule on Lawyer Who Took Test for Spouse

Ten years after being disbarred for impersonating her abusive husband at the bar exam, Laura Beth Salant says she has turned her life around and wants to practice law again.

But State Bar prosecutors say she is not ready.

Salant, now a paralegal working for the Internal Revenue Service in Los Angeles, has shown in recent proceedings that she cannot be believed and is not rehabilitated, prosecutors said in papers filed with the state Supreme Court.

The court will decide shortly whether to accept the recommendation of the bar’s disciplinary court to restore Salant’s license, or grant bar prosecutors’ request for full review of the case.

Salant, then Laura Beth Lamb, became a California lawyer in December 1983 and was an attorney with the Securities and Exchange Commission when her husband, Morgan Lamb, started pressuring her to take the bar exam for him.

He had failed once and had been fired by a Los Angeles law firm, according to the state Supreme Court’s 1989 ruling. He regularly screamed at her, threw heavy objects and threatened to kill her and her unborn child, one justice wrote.

Seven months pregnant and seriously ill, she cut her hair, wore men’s clothes for the identifying photo, signed her husband’s name and smudged her thumbprint at the July 1985 exam. She passed with the ninth-highest score in the state.

She eventually pleaded no contest to impersonation charges, was fined $2,500 and served 200 hours of community service. Her husband was convicted of forgery.