A Basic Breakdown of the Bar Exam

After you have graduated, you have to go through an initiation rite similar to those of certain college fraternities and sororities. Initiates to those groups get off easy, however, since they only have to eat live chickens and stuff goldfish up their noses, whereas you have to go through eight weeks of preparing for and taking the bar exam. The state bar association says that bar exams are designed to ensure the competency of the practicing bar. You learned about them in your antitrust class, under the topic of "Market Entry Barriers." They make it possible for people who are already admitted to the bar to make a living wage {i.e., about $200,000 a year). You will probably feel somewhat better about the exam's rationale after you pass it.




You will need to take an intensive seven-week course, costing a trillion dollars, to prepare for the bar exam. Wait a minute, you say. Why did I borrow ten trillion dollars (exceeding the national debt of some Third World countries) and spend three years of my life going to law school? Didn't law school teach me the law? No, you idiot. Law school's purpose is not to teach you the law. Law school taught you to THINK LIKE A LAWYER, unless you attended one of the elite schools, and then it taught you to think like a medieval philosopher, or a business school dropout. So you have to take the bar prep course.

Since it's an almost impossible task to memorize three years of material for one exam, bar prep courses use three principal techniques:

1. A tape recorder under your pillow as you sleep.
    
2. Mass hypnosis.
    
3. Blood doping.

Students for whom these techniques do not work are actually driven, as a last resort, to study the huge pile of outlines prepared by the bar prep course.

When you apply to take the bar exam, you must provide the names of 500 character witnesses. For obvious reasons, practicing lawyers may not be used as character witnesses. You must also list the exact address of every place you've ever lived since you were born. Heaven help you if your parents were in the military, or if you don't have a photographic memory.

Each state writes its own bar exam, which is an enormous duplication of effort and which produces bar exams of widely varying quality and difficulty. The exams in some large states, like New York and California, are very difficult to pass on the first attempt. Not long ago someone passed the California bar exam on his twenty-seventh attempt. He was the only person admitted in California that year. On the other hand, bar exams in less populous states are typically much easier. In some states, the only requirement for passing the bar exam is that you spell your first name correctly.

It would be much simpler if a group of skilled professionals wrote one bar exam that all fifty states could use, just as occurs with certified public accountant exams and securities licensing exams. In fact, a group of skilled professionals does write nationwide bar exam questions. The National Conference of Bar Examiners writes a set of multiple-choice questions called the Multistate Bar Exam, which most states use. It also writes excellent essay questions, but most states insist on using their homegrown products instead. If you ask why, the state bar will tell you that each state needs to test for competency on that state's law. But in fact, all bar exams test primarily on general American law, with only a few local issues thrown in.

Still, the bar examiners insist that those few local issues are important. But then they can't explain why, if a student achieves a high enough score on the Multistate Bar Exam, the examiners don't even bother to read the student's essays, which include the sprinkling of local issues. The truth is that they do believe that knowledge of general American law is enough.

The primary advantage of a national bar exam, from your perspective, is that you wouldn't have to take a new bar exam if you wanted to practice in another state. The primary disadvantage of a national bar exam, from the bar examiners' perspective, is that you wouldn't have to take a new bar exam if you wanted to practice in another state. So at least everyone sees the same issue clearly.

Meanwhile, for all you indignant bar examiners who want to write me threatening letters, think about it this way: the more people who read this treatise, the fewer who will become lawyers. So what are you complaining about?

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