If the bar exam went away entirely, hardly anybody would miss it.
The supreme court of Washington, acting in its supervisory power over the state’s courts, has ruled that the bar exam will no longer be the exclusive way to get admitted to practice law in the state:
The court approved alternative ways to show competency and earn a law license after appointing a task force to examine the issue in 2020. The Bar Licensure Task Force found that the traditional exam “disproportionally and unnecessarily blocks” marginalized groups from becoming practicing attorneys and is “at best minimally effective” for ensuring competency, according to a news release from the Washington Administrative Office of the Courts. Washington is the second state to not require the bar exam, following Oregon, which implemented the change at the start of this year. Other states, including Minnesota, Nevada, South Dakota and Utah, are examining alternative pathways to licensure. . . .
There will be three experiential-learning alternatives to the bar exam, each for people following a different path of legal study. The specifics, scale and implementation plan for the pathways have yet to be developed. Law school graduates can complete a six-month apprenticeship while being supervised and guided by a qualified attorney, along with finishing three courses. Law students can become practice-ready by completing 12 qualifying skills credits and 500 hours of work as a licensed legal intern. Upon completion of those requirements, they would submit a portfolio of that work to waive the bar exam.
There are other states with workarounds. Wisconsin, for example, allows graduates of the state’s two law schools — the University of Wisconsin and Marquette — to be admitted automatically to the Wisconsin bar without taking the test. At the same time, the state is joining others in revamping the exam itself:
Washington, Colorado and Minnesota have joined the list of states transitioning to the overhauled bar exam in the coming years. The State Supreme Court of Washington on Friday said, it will begin using the so-called Next Gen bar exam when it first becomes available in July 2026. Three days earlier, Minnesota’s high court issued an order that the state will transition to the Next Gen test in July 2027, while the Colorado Supreme Court announced on Thursday that it will start giving the new bar in July 2028. In total, 17 jurisdictions have said when they will move to the Next Gen bar exam. . . . The Next Gen bar exam is meant to emphasize legal skills and rely less on the memorization of laws, and it does away with the three separate components of the current exam — the 200-multiple-choice question Multistate Bar Exam, the Multistate Essay Exam, and the Multistate Performance Test. The Next Gen exam will also be shorter, at nine hours, compared with the current 12-hour test and will be given entirely on computers.
We might think of this as another component of the broader assault on standardized tests and standards in general, and if you read the rhetoric and review the list of jurisdictions signing on, it suggests that this is the spirit in which this is being offered. But in this case, the erosion of the test is a good thing, at least if the alternative pathways prove reasonably rigorous in practice.
The bar exam is anything but a measure of excellence in legal practice. It has traditionally been all about memorization of rules, in contrast to the Law School Admission Test (the LSAT), which is a test of legal reasoning skills. It is pass/fail, so there is no real incentive to do anything but survive it, no way to know who did, and nobody who cares. Everyone hates it. Because people cram so much unrelated information in such a short time with no experience applying it, almost every lawyer will tell you that they forgot everything they learned for the bar almost immediately. Its chief function is as a barrier to entry to legal practice. The existence of the exam and the fact that few law schools fully prepare graduates for the test (the top law schools, being national rather than state-focused, do almost nothing to prepare their students for the bar) means that most graduates feel compelled to pay the companies that do bar-exam prep. Back in 1996, when I was taking the bar, BARBRI had all but a monopoly on bar prep (I saved a few bucks by going with West Publishing’s short-lived effort to crack into the market).
The one benefit of the bar is that it forces you to study all manner of areas of law that you didn’t learn in law school and won’t learn in practice unless you’re an extremely wide-ranging generalist. Even if you forget the actual rules, having encountered them before makes them a bit more familiar if you run across them again; concepts, at least, may come to mind if somebody asks you a question, and that gives you a way to start looking up the answers. So, it’s not totally useless. But the amount of expense and effort that goes into that instruction is not so valuable. And if the bar is going to be revamped to make it shorter and require knowing fewer things, even those benefits will be lost.
Allowing people to qualify by experience and apprenticeship without a credentialing intermediary is a restoration of tradition. Americans used to train for the law largely by apprenticeship. Harvard founded its law school, the first in the nation, in 1817, although some colleges had law programs before that. Distinguished lawyers such as Abraham Lincoln never set foot in a college or law school; the same was true of seven early Supreme Court justices. Robert Jackson, who died in 1954, was the last justice without a law degree. There is still much to be said for the idea that requiring prospective lawyers to pay for an expensive three-year education in the law is excessive.
The bar exam actually served an arguably more useful purpose when people didn’t go to law school. It was exclusively an oral examination until Massachusetts introduced the first written bar exam in 1855; a local judge would usually act as the examiner to see if an apprentice was ready.
Ideally, we should be moving toward fewer licensing requirements and less exclusive credentialing bottlenecks across occupations and professions. The law does need some such controls, given the extent to which lawyers (unlike most other private occupations) exercise a form of government power in invoking the courts and drafting legal agreements. But if the bar exam went away entirely, hardly anybody would miss it.