Professor Daniel J.
Solove
Associate
professor of law at the George
Washington University Law School.
Despite my enjoyment of the Bar Exam as
a work of jurisprudence, I believe that the Bar Exam should be abolished.
It prevents mobility among lawyers, making it cumbersome and time
consuming to move to different states.
It does not test on actual law used in legal practice, but on esoteric
legal rules, many of which are obsolete, and most of which are of absolutely no
value to a practicing attorney or to anyone for that matter. In short, the Bar Exam is an unproductive waste of time.
My guess is most all lawyers would agree. So why does the Bar Exam
persist?
Perhaps as a way for states to restrain competition among lawyers . . .
but this would be an impermissible purpose.
Perhaps inertia. Perhaps because of the “we suffered, now you
must suffer too” mentality. I can’t
think of good reasons for retaining the Bar Exam. Yet this
misery-creating, time-wasting ritual survives -- even thrives -- despite the
fact that it has no valid justification and has achieved near universal
enmity.
In lieu of the Bar, states should permit
all students who graduate from an accredited law school to become members of
the Bar after working a certain amount of
supervised pro bono hours. All the time
spent studying for testing could be used for pro bono work, which would provide
a benefit to the community and practical training for future lawyers. I think that this is much better than wasting
most of a summer studying for a meaningless test.
Comments
* The best thing would be to abolish the stupid bar
exam entirely, and require practitioners to gain their professional reputation
through actual competence and knowledge, rather than through a test which is designed to preserve the
cartel, rather than to protect the public. The idea that the result would
be incompetent lawyers ruining people's lives lacks evidence and flies in the
face of experience.