Thanks to the American Bar Association’s demand for “high professional standards” (read: a high barrier to entry), law-school programs must require three years to complete. (If you don’t get the degree, in most states you can’t take the bar exam, no matter how much you know about the law.)

In a break with tradition and the pooh-bahs of the ABA, Northwestern is going to allow students to squeeze the credits they need for a degree into five semesters. Students will be able to graduate in two years if they want to. Here’s the story in the Chicago Tribune.

Naturally, the law-school guild is all up in arms. University of Chicago law prof and former dean Geoffrey Stone frets that this move risks creating “inferior lawyers.”

Oh, baloney. If students believe that sticking around for a full three years is useful, they can do so. Most, I suspect, have come to understand that almost everything they’ll need to know in legal practice they’ll learn on the job, not in a classroom. That notably inferior lawyer Clarence Darrow dropped out of the University of Michigan’s law school after one semester.

Good for Northwestern, but it’s only a baby step. The reform that cuts the Gordian Knot here would be for states to allow anyone to take the bar exam without any formal educational requirement. A tiny number of states currently do that. As the cost of obtaining a law degree continues to rise, more people would consider learning what they need to know to pass the bar in “non-traditional” ways. (Actually, they are the traditional ways, if you go back to the 19th century.)

The even-more-radical change that states should make is to repeal their unauthorized-practice-of-law prohibitions, a position I’ve argued for here.