I do not watch much TV, and even fewer legal shows. Would it be fair to say these shows might put you at a disadvantage? That they (gasp!) prioritize drama over verisimilitude?
Generally speaking, legal shows are absolute nonsense, although some are better than others. Legal Eagle on YouTube rates legal scenes in movies and TV shows.
Also, legal drama tends to focus on trials. You’re not going to be asked about trial practice on an exam because no law school graduate knows anything about it. You will be asked about the rules of evidence and riles of procedure but not actual trial practice.
With the essay portions of bar exams, I recall that it is the opposite of this. Meaning, I seem to remember that - as part of test prep - it was emphasized to use as many applicable concepts as you could, since you get points for correctly spotting issues. I, of course, may be remembering incorrectly, but I don’t recall being docked for wrong answers (rather, you just end up using the allotted space with writing that doesn’t generate points).
Besides these essay portions, I remember that most of the rest of the test prep was memorizing elements, often with mnemonic devices. As an example, when does a contract have to be put in writing (a doctrine called the statute of frauds)? The answer was MY LEGS: contracts involving marriage, take more than a year, transfer land, appoint an executor, establish a guarantor, or are sales covered the Uniform Commercial Code.
(Although, in explaining this, it occurs to me that these terms address topics which were explained over the course of semester long classes, so maybe it is true that the information would be lost on somebody not so prepared.
(Perhaps think of law school like learning a new language, and the bar exam like being expected to find a specific location in a foreign city where that language is spoken by being giving a map and directions in that language)
Certainly acronyms and aids play a big role in medical education. I know hundreds, and use dozens often. Everything from CHIMPANZEES for high blood levels of calcium, to “point and shoot” to remind you which nervous system controls the actions of the joystick - parasympathetic or sympathetic…
An interesting variation on this question would be: among those lawyers who passed the bar on the first try, how many of them would have passed if they had taken the bar right before going to law school? That weeds out the people who lack the innate ability or basic pre-law education to pull it off, and instead makes it a pure question of “how much is law school plus a bar prep course needed to pass the bar?” I’m guessing only a small fraction of the incoming 1Ls who will eventually pass could do it on their current smarts alone.
You want people who haven’t prepared for the bar exam to sit for the bar exam? That’s not an interesting experiment, at all. They’re going to fail.
What a bizarrely hostile response to an alternative take on the OP. I’m not proposing we actually do any such experiment, merely that we consider the likely outcome if we did, as a way of better conceptualizing the answer. “Average citizens” is a large group that includes many people who would never be able to pass the bar no matter how diligently they prepared. I’m saying that, even among those who are indisputably capable, as evidenced by their membership in the group of people who will pass on the first try once they’ve had the usual preparation, the number who could pass without that preparation would still be very small. I’m not saying it would be zero, though, and if you are, I’d be curious to hear your reasoning.
Having been to law school, and having taken a bar exam prep course, and having taken a bar exam, I am pretty confident in saying that pretty much zero people who sit for the bar exam without any preparation will pass the bar exam. You can’t pass by accident. You also can’t pass by using general knowledge.
I have also been to law school, taken a prep course, and passed one of the hardest, if not the hardest, bar exams in the US (California, where roughly half of us fail each time). And while I agree the requisite knowledge isn’t general, I’m just not sure the number of people who possess it without having passed the secret initiation rites is zero. Lots of things that aren’t general knowledge are known to some people with no formal training in that specific area.
I do think that most people who haven’t been to law school or taken a prep course would bomb the exam at a level unheard-of among those who came prepared. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them managed not to score a single point, despite a portion of the test being multiple-choice. But I also wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a law professor’s kid, an experienced paralegal or legal secretary, a vexatious litigant, or a jailhouse lawyer somehow barely passing if they lucked out on the subjects covered by the essay questions.
Maybe some people will “luck out” on a handful of multiple choice questions. But the possibility that someone will “luck out” to the extent that they actually pass the exam is pretty much zero in my opinion. Without preparation, they certainly will get almost zero points on the essay questions, which aren’t scored by “getting the right answer” but rather by showing your reasoning process. If you haven’t been shown how to answer such questions, you’re not going to luck into a passing score.
And it’s much more than “secret initiation.” It’s being taught the language and form of legal questions and how to respond to them.
I would rule all this out, unless their experience includes preparing them for the types of questions that will be asked and the expected form of the responses. That’s why I say in every response that someone who hasn’t prepared for taking the exam will certainly fail it.
No one answered my earlier question directly on which bar exams are reputed to be harder or easier. California is tough?
Anyone take multiple exams? What’s the record?
When I took the bar exam in my home province many years ago, after the Earth had cooled, it was a three day exam: one day on essay questions on general matters of law; one day of provincial statutes; and one day of federal statutes. I think the failure rate of anyone who walked in off the street without having gone to law school would have been 100%.
Nowadays, there isn’t a single “bar exam” - it’s a series of seminars and assignments throughout your year of articles, to teach skills for legal practice. (In Canada, after you finish law school, you have to do a year of articles, ie professional internship, supervised by a lawyer with 10 years at the bar, who undertakes to introduce you to the practice of law).
In fact, applying life experience and “common sense” would not help you AT ALL.
It just seems weird that you would go to school to learn how to do a certain job, but that the schooling will not help you pass the test you need to actually qualify to be able to get that job. It’s not that I expect everything in law school to be on the test. But it seems weird that the prep isn’t also part of the experience.
Think about a more everyday test. I know some people get help on how to take their SAT or ACT tests. But, while those can help a bit, they aren’t actually required. Your normal high school classes, while not focused on teaching for the exam, do give you enough information to learn it.
It seems even weirder that you don’t have classes in law school that help you learn how to go about doing the job. If it doesn’t help you pass the test, and it doesn’t give you the necessary practical skills, it seems odd there would still be so much to cover. In most jobs that’s it: there’s the theory and the practice. And that theory would be what a written test would evaluate. So it seems so weird that law school would not cover either what you need for the test or practical skills. There usually isn’t anything else.
But what is the job? What does “practising law” mean, and how do you teach that? I’ve got a friend who recently retired after over 30 years of going to court, if not daily, then certainly weekly, and running trial after trial. I’ve also got a friend who for much the same period has been doing commerical practice, never once setting foot in a court room after articles. They’re both practising law, but I can’t imagine too more different careers.
In my province, about 2/3 of the lawyers are in private practice. There’s the barrister / solicitor split, so you have some in the same firm doing court work, and some doing solicitor work. The court room work varies tremendously, as the work of a criminal lawyer is completely different from the chambers work of corporate litigators, who may spend years going to court but never run a trial. Family law litigation is different again from criminal work, and from corporate litigation. On the solicitor side, it may be real estate, which has its own pitfalls, or corporate work, or wills and estates and family.
The other 1/3 of our bar are not in private practise. They’re corporate counsel, or in government work, or non-profit agencies, or administrative agencies - or working within courts - quite a variety of work. Some of those are barristers, some are solicitors. Some might litigate only before administrative agencies, federal or provincial, but not got to court. Some may go to court a lot. Among those who go to court, some may appear in provincial courts, some may appear in federal courts, like the tax court. Some may never go to court, and do solicitor work within admin agencies, non-profit agencies, or Attorney General ministries.
How does a law school prepare each of them for their practice, so each of them could step into the practice right after graduation? The answer is that law school can’t. There’s just too much variety in the practice of law. Law schools provide the theoretical underpinnings, and then you have to learn on the job, and find out what kind of law you want to practise and are good at.
I’m a barrister. You don’t want me drawing up your will, or preparing your corporate strucure, or doing your house deal. And I would never do those things, because they’re outside my area. I know the theoretical underpinnings for each of those, since they were covered in my law school days, but I’ve never been interested in learning the actual skills to be able to use that theoretical knowledge.
Law school can’t teach the practice of law because there is no single “practice of law”.
But keeping in mind the topic at hand, what does a bar exam do that an accredited law school can’t? Just because law schools choose to focus more on general and non-specific legal knowledge and theory as opposed to jurisdiction-specific substantive law doesn’t mean they have to. If law schools at places like University of Virginia, University of Michigan, University of Texas, and the whole damn University of California system weren’t so busy competing with each other for prestige in the national rankings, they might actually be able to lead a sea change whereby law schools at public universities at least emphasize producing bar-ready graduates capable of practicing law in their respective jurisdictions rather than glorified “legal studies” majors pretending to the title of “Juris Doctor.”
What does “bar-ready” mean? Does it mean running a criminal trial? Commercial chambers work? Wills and estates? And if the law school teaches someone to be able to do one fo those areas as soon as they leave law school, then they will not have had a general legal education. The more you specialise for a particular area of practice in law school, the less time you will have to learn the law in general.
That is my position. I view the exam as little more than a fraternal hazing ritual. With a side course of income generation for bar prep providers.
As I recall it, in law school, the 1st year is a standardized curriculum. Everyone takes Constitutional law, criminal law, torts, contracts, property, legal research and writing… I believe the 2d 2 years are entirely up to the student. For example, I never took a class in tax, or estates - but I’m pretty sure both were on the exam. Conversely, I took several classes in administrative and international law - but don’t think either were tested.
I wouldn’t say law school offered NOTHING to aid in passing the test. The 1st year is VERY useful, and introduces you to all manner of terms/concepts/practices that are completely new to most.
For various reasons, the most prestigious law school distance themselves from offering “practical” training for any specific jurisdiction. They want to offer themselves as appealing to as broad of a demographic as possible. As opposed to a more local school, which might better train someone to work in that specific area - such as NY, Chicago, Calif…
My personal thought is that law schools really overdo the “thinking like a lawyer” and “abstract” aspect, as that generates lawyers who are less sensitive to practical realities of how the world works. Sure, you CAN do something, or make an argument. But SHOULD you? Are you doing anything of value (other than whoring for your master) by doing so?
I’ve taken bar exams in three states. I’m sure that’s not the record. But it’s a pain, not just the exam but the background checks etc. The bar associations want an incredible amount of information about your life.
One problem is that you don’t necessarily know where your students will take the bar. A big chunk of my law school class went to New York (and took the NY bar) and a big chunk went to DC (and took either Maryland or Virginia); smaller chunks went to California or Texas. A smattering went to just about every other above-average population state (and a few to others).
We all took “Torts” and “Contracts” and “Property” together and, for that most part, that material should have helped on any state’s exam. But there are a lot of other topics (estates, family law, state civil procedure) that are likely to vary and which state’s law do you teach?