The Bar Exam Revisited

It takes them a long time to grade those bar exams. Many apply again and again.
 

1. Getting Geared Up


Failing was not the worst possible experience. The bar examiners informed one of the students that his examination had been, would you believe, lost. A pessimist, he thought there was a good chance he'd failed, so he put in two months studying all over again before they found his exam, graded it, and told him that he had passed after all.

Some fail multiple times. A student rode on the subway to the July exam. He insisted on getting off at 59th Street and running the remaining blocks to work off tension. He had done well in law school, but, last I heard, he never did pass the New York bar exam, even after trying three or four times, and despite taking months to study before a couple of those tries.

Another student's firm dumped him when he failed. He couldn't find another job, so he eventually got depressed and gave up. Several years later, a TV reporter did a story on the people who were living in the New York City subway tunnels, and they found this student taking shelter in the dirt under Grand Central Station.

In most things, as they say, the best approach is: If at first you don't succeed, try again, then quit. No sense being a damned fool about it.

2. Extreme Effort

You have to begin your full-time studies for the bar exam in early December. "Full-time" means 14 to 18 hours a day, seven days a week during that month. You need to devote every spare minute to study.

3. Side Effects

They say there's nothing more stressful than the first year of law school. Problems with relationships during law school and the bar exam are hardly news. Even those rah-rah Fordham law professors who say law school can be warm and caring have to admit that the law school experience is awfully tough on relationships.... Major decisions concerning a relation-ship should not be made while in law school and certainly not prior to receipt of grades at the end of the first year.

The Other Requirements for Admission

In New York and most other states, the bar exam is not the only requirement you must fulfill in order to be admitted to practice. Many states also require you to pass the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination (the MPRE or the Ethics Exam for short). Compared to the Multistate, the Ethics Exam doesn't take so long to grade, it's much easier to pass, and all of the jurisdictions that require it will let you transfer your scores from another jurisdiction.

You may also have to obtain other elements of legal education before you're permitted to practice. In addition to the academic requirements for admission to the bar, you have to pay a fee. You may also have other minor paperwork requirements. But these pale against the amount of time and effort you must devote to that most obvious of all documents, the "Application for Admission to the Bar." With all of its attachments, my application for admission in New York consisted of 18 legal-sized pages.

The application is pretty bad in some states. Armed with the information you provide, the examiners may contact every high school and college you attended and every employer you've ever had (including the part-time and casual ones), as well as seeking three references for every place you've lived. They may ask about parking fines, child support obligations, bankruptcy, divorce, debts past due, bounced checks, your health, and even a "poor attitude." The ABA actually encourages them to bother asking such broad questions as whether you have ever made "false statements, including omissions," been guilty of "misconduct in employment," or engaged in any "acts involving dishonesty." Heaven forbid that you should have gone to see a campus shrink during your worst days in law school, because they'll want to know about it before they admit you to practice law, and they'll take that little visit seriously. They may want to know about buying sprees, reckless driving, foolish business investments, and "sexual behavior unusual for the individual," which may include not only homosexuality but ordinary heterosexual cohabitation or "living in sin" - and those sins can keep you from practicing law.

The usual requirements for admission [to the practice of law] are possession of good moral character and fitness, i.e., law abiding and free from drug or alcohol dependency. It would be one thing if everyone had to be a saint. But they do a miserable job of reviewing these applications. It's pretty much hit or miss. Only two out of every thousand applicants is denied admission at this stage. The thing is, you don't want to be one of those two losers.

If you catch their attention, they'll be much harder on you than they are on practicing lawyers, even when the practitioner poses a much greater danger to the client than does the new admittee.249 Thus, you can be kept from practicing law for hypersensitivity, rigidity, unwarranted suspicion, excessive self-importance, a tendency to blame others, or intemperate language. But you don't want to go too far the other way, either. You can get into trouble for excessive immaturity, a lackadaisical attitude, or conveying the feeling that you lack interest in correcting yourself.

As with the bar exam pass rates, there's no consensus among the states on this. For example, while an actual mental illness may not be enough to keep you out of practice in Nevada, mere "religious fanaticism" might X you in Arizona, Illinois, and Wyoming. In one case, a conscientious objector was excluded because he could not swear to uphold the state constitution's requirement that he serve in the state militia in time of war.

You'll find inconsistency even within states. Maryland denied admission to an applicant who had stolen sleeping pills and left the scene of an accident, but admitted a person who had been convicted as the driver of a getaway car in a bank robbery. Michigan once refused to admit a person who had violated a fishing license statute 10 years earlier, but admitted someone who had been convicted of child molesting and someone else who had spent several years in a maximum security prison for conspiring to bomb a public building.

The pretense of making sure that you are morally fit for the practice of law has aided in discrimination against women, minorities, and those who support unpopular causes. Nevada asks you if you're a Communist. Tennessee requires you to list all organizations to which you belong, despite the fact that it's illegal for them to do so.

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