Bar examination

A bar examination is a lengthy examination (two or more days) conducted at regular intervals to determine whether a candidate is qualified to practice law in a given jurisdiction.

United States

Bar examinations in the United States are administered by government agencies of individual states, except for the patent bar, which is separately administered by the Office of Enrollment and Discipline of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The state agency is invariably associated with the judicial branch of government, because American attorneys are all officers of the court of the bar(s) to which they belong.

Sometimes the agency is an office or committee of the state's highest court or intermediate appellate court. In states which have a unified or integrated bar association (meaning that formal membership in a public corporation controlled by the judiciary is required to practice therein), the agency is usually a committee or office of the state bar association.

Several states once granted the "diploma privilege" to certain law schools, meaning that graduates of those schools automatically became lawyers and did not need to take a separate bar examination. Today, there is only one jurisdiction that allows diploma privilege, with a second set to start doing so in 2008:

Wisconsin grants the privilege to graduates of two in-state law schools, the Marquette University Law School and the University of Wisconsin Law School.
In 2005, New Hampshire launched the Daniel Webster Scholar Honors Program, an alternative route to bar admission involving intensive clinical instruction and constant monitoring by the state bar and supreme court, at the state's only law school, Franklin Pierce Law Center. Only 25 students are admitted annually. The first Webster Scholars will graduate in 2008. Webster Scholars must still pass the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination (discussed more fully below) and meet character and fitness requirements to earn admission, but are exempt from taking the New Hampshire bar examination.

Passing the bar exam is typically the most arduous part of the process of gaining admission to the bar. Other requirements usually include a separate ethics examination, a moral character investigation, a baccalaureate degree and a doctoral degree in professional law (usually called Juris Doctor or Doctor of Jurisprudence). Five states, however — California and New York among them — do not require a law degree to be eligible for the bar exam.

California is the only state that accepts a law degree by correspondence, and in which a baccalaureate degree is neither required for admission to the bar nor as a prerequisite for earning a Juris Doctor in law. Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason, was admitted to the California bar in 1911 and may still be the most famous California attorney who never went to law school — though there are still many lawyers practicing in California without either a bachelor's degree or a law degree.

Where it is required, the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination, an ethics exam, is always administered separately from the state's bar exam. In fact, it is not administered by the states at all but by the National Conference of Bar Examiners, which creates it and grades it. The MPRE is offered three times a year, in March, August and November.

The bar examination in most U.S. states and territories is two days long and consists of:

A number of essay questions that test knowledge of general legal principles, and may also test knowledge of the state's own law (usually subjects such as wills, trusts and community property, which always vary from one state to another)
several complicated essay questions that test knowledge of that state's law;
the Multistate Bar Examination, a standardized, multiple-choice examination created and sold to participating state bar examiners by the National Conference of Bar Examiners. The MBE contains 200 questions which test six subjects based upon principles of common law that apply throughout the United States.

The State of Washington administers a two-and-a-half day all-essay exam. The half-day on the morning of the third day is the state's own ethics exam, since it does not use the MPRE.

Because Louisiana and Puerto Rico are civil law jurisdictions instead of common law jurisdictions, they do not use the MBE, as the law it tests is irrelevant in those jurisdictions. Instead, they administer only essay questions covering their own law.

Some jurisdictions, like California, also require a performance test as a more realistic measure of actual lawyering skill; the candidate is presented with a stack of documents representing a fictional case and is asked to draft a memorandum, motion, or opinion document. Many jurisdictions use the Multistate Performance Test (MPT), which was modeled after the California Performance Test. But whereas the California Performance Test is three hours long, the Multistate Performance Test — which is designed to complement the Multistate Essay Examination (which few jurisdictions use) is only 90 minutes long.

The California bar examination is one of the most arduous in the nation, consisting of 6 hours per day for three consecutive days, for a total of 18 hours. The first and third days constitute the written portion of the exam, while the second is given over to the MBE. The written portion contains six one-hour essay questions and two three-hour California performance tests. California used to conduct its own scaling of MBE results, separately from national scaling and based only upon the performance of California examinees. However, California has recently adopted the national scaling of the MBE and applies the national scale, made by the National Conference of Bar Examiners, to its own exam.

Louisiana

The Louisiana bar exam holds the distinction of being the longest bar exam in the United States, consisting of 21 hours of examination on nine topic areas over three days. Testing is done on the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of the designated exam week, with nothing on Tuesday and Thursday. Topic areas tested on Monday include Code I, II, and III (general Louisiana Civil Code topics). Wednesday's session covers Louisiana Code of Civil Procedure, Torts, and Business Enterprises. Friday's session covers Constitutional Law; Criminal Law, Procedure, and Evidence; and Federal Jurisdiction and Procedure. The first five sections are referred to informally as "Code Sections" (since they test law that is supposed to be specific to the Louisiana Civil Code), and the last four are referred to as "non-Code Sections." This distinction is important for determining of someone has passed the bar exam (see below on passing.) The exam is almost entirely subjective essay questions, with some objective true/false or short-answer questions occasionally thrown in, depending on the specific examiner for that subject area. Louisiana does not use the Multistate Bar Exam. The exam is offered twice a year, in February and July; with the July examination offered in both the New Orleans and Baton Rouge areas. The February exam is only offered in the Baton Rouge area. Each of the nine sections has one examiner, who writes both the exam question and model answer, and a certain number of graders who grade the actual answers to the exams. Each exam is scored on a scale of 0 to 100, with 70 being a passing score. Once a grader determines that a particular applicant has passed a section, his or her decision is final and not reviewable. If a grader determines that an applicant has failed a particular section, then the failed exam is reviewed and re-scored by the the examiner for that section. The examiner's decision is final. The graders are selected from licensed attorneys across the state, and receive CLE credit for their time.

"Passing" the Louisiana bar exam is a bit different than most other jurisdictions, as there is no final "score." Instead, a bar applicant must pass seven of the nine sections in order to pass the exam. However, it cannot be any seven of the nine sections, the examinee must also pass four of five "code sections" in order to pass outright. If an applicant does not meet that requirement, but passes any five sections is considered to have "conditioned" the exam, and only has to retake the areas he or she failed. An applicant is only given two more tries to pass the failed portions before he or she is required to retake the entire exam. There is no limit on the number of times one can take the Louisiana bar. Results of each examination are mailed to each applicant as well as posted on the front doors of the Louisiana State Supreme Court building and on the Supreme Court's website. Passing applicants are listed by full name, with conditional or failed applicants listed by ficticious name. The ficticious names are chosen by all applicants prior to taking the bar, and can get quite creative.

Most bar exams are administered on consecutive days. Louisiana is the exception, administering its three-day examination on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Also, Louisiana's examination is the longest in the country in terms of examination time, with 7 hours on each day for a total of 21 hours.

Preparation for the bar examination

The bar exam is administered twice a year, usually the last week in February and the last week in July. Students typically spend between two and three months preparing for the bar exam, which is administered over two to three day periods depending on the state in question. All examinees must be present in person, and many states have strict guidelines about what people may take into the examination room, what they may wear during the exam, and when a person may leave their seat for any reason.

Law students usually engage in a grueling regimen of study (called "bar review") in the period between graduating from law school and sitting for the bar. The majority of American law students enroll in classes presented by a company called BarBri. Although there are several other bar review courses available, the only other one that seems to be widely popular is PMBR, which focuses solely on the Multistate Bar Exam. PMBR courses are usually scheduled in the week before and/or the week after BarBri courses, and are designed to reinforce what BarBri teaches and teach multiple choice techniques. Also popular is the PLI course on the MPRE.

Bar review tends to be one of the the more stressful and unpleasant process which a law student faces before becoming a lawyer, and may be a contributing factor to the unusually high rate of drug and alcohol abuse among lawyers. In one notorious case, George N. Seide made a living by trafficking in cocaine for several years while trying to pass the difficult California bar exam; he was ultimately caught and convicted. Seide was not only a law school graduate but a former Florida deputy sheriff who had lectured schoolchildren on the evils of illegal drugs. Although he finally passed the exam in 1986, the Supreme Court of California upheld the State Bar's refusal to admit Seide to the bar.Seide v. Committee of Bar Examiners, 49 Cal. 3d 933 (1989). After two years of rehabilitation, Seide was admitted in 1992.

Because the MBE is a standardized test, it must be administered on the same day across the country. That day occurs twice a year as the last Wednesday in July and the last Wednesday in February. Two states, Delaware and North Dakota, only administer their bar exams once in July, since they do not have enough applicants to merit a second sitting in February.

About 25 of the 54 U.S. jurisdictions offer reciprocal admission, or "admission on motion." If an attorney has practiced law successfully for a minimum length of time in one reciprocal jurisdiction, he or she may be admitted without examination in another reciprocal jurisdiction. In all but two cases, the jurisdiction in which they are currently licensed must extend the same reciprocity to attorneys licensed in the other state. The exceptions are the District of Columbia, which has universal, "one-way" reciprocity with all U.S. jurisdictions; and the State of Michigan, which has limited universal reciprocity. Michigan will admit attorneys without examination if they are members in good standing of another state's bar and will be opening a law office in Michigan.

Arguments against the bar exam

A statement by the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) articulates many criticisms of the bar exam. The statement can be found at http://www.saltlaw.org/positionbarexam.htm. This statement was also published in 54 JOURNAL OF LEGAL EDUCATION 442–458.

Arguments in favor of the bar exam

The National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) regularly provides articles relating to the bar examination process. Typically, they are in favor of it. To see a general collection of the articles available, go to:

http://www.ncbex.org/pubs/bar_examiner/most_recent.htm

Arguments for alternatives to the bar exam

The NCBE published an article in 2005 addressing alternatives to the bar exam, including a discussion of New Hampshire's Daniel Webster Scholar Program. The article can be found at:

http://www.ncbex.org/pubs/pdf/2005_Volume74/740405/740405_Essay.pdf

England and Wales

In England and Wales, the series of exams taken to become a barrister is sometimes known as bar finals or Bar Exams/Examinations.

Nowadays these exams are usually taken as part of the Bar Vocational Course at establishments such as the College of Law.

See barrister for further information about qualifying in England and Wales. England and Wales are in Europe.

References

The Louisiana Supreme Court Committee on Bar Admissions.

Lawyers

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