What makes the bar exam to become a lawyer so hard to pass? And how well does law school prepare one to pass the exam?

Question

(I’m American and am aware that different states have different tests).

In: 23

Answer 1

I will speak from my perspective as a Canadian who studied at U of T law.

Law school is basically 100% irrelevant to the bar exam. Actually I’d go further and say that law school is 95% irrelevant to being a lawyer. Most of law school consists in studying case law and the evolution of precedent. What matters is the current state of the law. You can fast forward to studying the law at present without going through all the historical evolution. (I am confident that anyone capable of getting into law school could pass all their classes without going to a single lecture, so long as they had a two page study sheet of the law for each class, and they practiced writing a couple arguments.) But if law school was truncated they (a) couldn’t justify the cost of the program, and (b) couldn’t pretend that lawyers and judges have some kind of special qualification, even though they are just people arguing about stuff.

The bar exam is basically a hazing that tests your ability to memorize and locate legal information. Not only is law school irrelevant to the bar, the bar is mostly irrelevant to legal work. Whenever you have a case in front of you you are going to be looking stuff up anyway. It would be negligent to rely strictly on your memorization ability. And the information you are required to know for the bar is unlikely to be what you are doing in practice.

The bar exam, as a hazing/induction ritual, is also another means by which the legal community convinces themselves and others that they are a special class of person uniquely qualified on legal matters. Other means include using specialized language and Latin for no reason (there is in law a doctrine of “res ipsa loquitur” which is the Latin way of saying “duh, obviously”–but that doesn’t sound professional enough, so they need to cloak it in Latin), wearing special clothes and having their own heightened etiquette, having judges wear ridiculous robes and sit on a raised platform, etc.