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The bar exam will no longer be required to become a lawyer in Washington, the state Supreme Court ruled in a pair of orders Friday. 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...

That incident at Stanford has really brought attention to this issue. It’s great to see people responding. The Washington Free Beacon reports: "The state of Texas is updating its bar application to include questions about whether applicants have engaged in “incivility and violations of school policies,” according to a letter from the Texas Supreme Court obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The change is a direct response to an incident at Stanford Law School last month in which students shouted down a federal judge. Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) wrote to the bar in March suggesting the change, arguing that...

Former CA agent helped a man tied to organized crime learn if his associates were under investigation ... A former FBI agent in Northern California who handled national security issues was convicted Tuesday of accepting at least $150,000 in gifts and cash bribes to provide confidential information to a man with organized crime ties, prosecutors said. Babak Broumand, 56, of Lafayette, was found guilty in Los Angeles of conspiracy, bribery of a public official and monetary transactions in property derived from unlawful activity, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement. He could face 15 to 45 years in...

Vice President Kamala Harris could be the first Supreme Court Justice to have failed the Bar exam — that is, if rumors that President Joe Biden may nominate her to the nation’s highest court are true. For the past several days, speculation has been building that Biden might dispense with the unpopular Harris by “promoting” her to the Supreme Court, to which he has promised to nominate black female justices. He would then replace her with another vice president, possibly Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, assuming that he could pass a majority vote of both houses of Congress, as required.

The State Bar of California has agreed to launch a comprehensive assessment of whether the minimum score needed to pass its bar examination should be lowered to allow more prospective attorneys to pass. In recent weeks, a growing chorus of voices — from state legislators to law school deans to court officials — have registered urgent concerns that the lowest score needed to pass the exam, commonly referred to as the “cut score,” is too high, flunking would-be attorneys who would qualify to practice law nearly everywhere else in the country. That sense of urgency has increased since November, after...

Mika Brzezinski used an unfortunate metaphor on today’s Morning Joe to describe Hillary and Trump’s different approaches to preparing for Monday’s first presidential debate. Said Mika: “you think of like the two law students preparing for the bar. The guy is polishing his car to calm down. And the girl is studying up to the last minute.” Mika is apparently unaware that Hillary flunked the DC bar exam after graduating from Yale law school in 1973. 67% of the people taking the exam at the same time passed, putting Hillary in the bottom third. Maybe instead of studying, she was...

Rejoice, future California lawyers! The CA State Bar Board of Trustees just voted to scale back the state’s onerous three-day exam, said by some to be the hardest bar exam in the country, to a more comfortable two-day affair. ... California was weighing a proposal to alter the test format to include one day of essays (5 one-hour essays and a 90-minute performance test) and one day of the MBE, with both days weighed equally. As noted in that post, this scales back the performance test from its previous 3-hour length ... Meanwhile, every California lawyer should start working on...

On Wednesday and Thursday, law school graduates aspiring to practice in the Commonwealth gathered in Boston and Springfield to take the 16-hour bar exam, broken into several parts. During the morning portion of the test Thursday, recent graduate of the University of Michigan Law School Iman Abdulrazzak was handed a note from an exam proctor asking her to remove her headscarf. As many Muslim women do, Abdulrazzak wore a hijab, covering her head and chest, during the exam held at the Western New England University School of Law. The note, written in capitalized block letters read, "Headwear may not be...

[SNIP] ....Based on my limited interactions and after reading more about [San Antonio Mayor Julian] Castro, it is clear that he is superficially very different from the older Latino leaders but very similar in other ways. The most prominent Hispanic mayor in America is Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Before Castro was born, Villaraigosa was at UCLA leading the openly racist, secessionist, and anti-American group MEChA. After engaging in protests to try to get the ChicanoStudies Department to give money to an openly communist group, he dropped out of UCLA and attended the unaccredited People's School of Law. He took...

In his 19 years as a law professor at UCLA, Richard Sander has pondered a nagging question: Does affirmative action help or hinder African Americans who want to become lawyers? Two years ago, he published research suggesting that racial preferences at law firms might be responsible for black lawyers' high rate of attrition and difficulty making partner. He hypothesized that in the interest of promoting diversity, law firms sometimes hired black lawyers who were underqualified, and that when there was a "credentials gap" between black and white lawyers at a firm, black lawyers often were less likely to advance and...

BOSTON, Massachusetts, July 3, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A man who was given a failing grade on the Massachusetts bar exam has filed a complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief and damages and is demanding a jury trial, claiming that he failed the exam after refusing to answer an inappropriate question on homosexual marriage. Besides requesting that bar examiners do not consider the offending question when grading his exam, however, Dunne is also challenging the very constitutionality of the homosexual "marriage" laws in the state of Massachusetts. In the list of defendants Dunne includes the Supreme Judicial Court and the individual Justices. In...

If George W. Bush had gone to law school and later flunked the bar exam, you can imagine that fact would have become a virtual part of his name in the MSM, as in "George Bush, who failed the bar exam, today criticized a law that . . ." But it came as news to me when Carl Bernstein mentioned on this morning's "Today" that Hillary flunked the Washington, DC bar exam back in the '70s. OK, I'm not the most knowledegable guy, and the fact of Hillary's failure is not news -- after years of hiding the embarrassment, she...

   Lowering The Bar January 5, 2006 Clifton Eames has been reading too much of René Descartes.  When Eames flunked the Texas bar exam four times in a row, he reacted although, “...there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me....”  Perhaps he is just a bit too obsessed by his belief in “Cogito ergo sum”. The State Bar of Texas has a rule which limits the number of times an individual can take the bar exam to five.  If you flunk all five times, that is the end of any ambitions to practice...

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times The final hurdle: Many more blacks than whites fail to pass the bar examination. ONE would have thought, given the decades of ardent debate over affirmative action in higher education, that the main axes of the dispute had been established. Defenders of racial preferences say that they compensate for historical wrongs, ensure vibrant and varied campus discourse and help create minority role models and leaders. Opponents say preferences are nothing but a reverse form of discrimination that stereotypes and stigmatizes minority students. But a recent study published in The Stanford Law Review by Richard...

After failing the New York state bar exam five times, Marilyn Bartlett is considering a sixth attempt, now that the long-running matter of Bartlett v. New York State Board of Law Examiners has been settled in her favor. Bartlett, whose reading ability is severely impaired by dyslexia, will be granted twice the ordinary two days' time to complete the bar exam, if she takes it again.