this should bring a small sigh of relief for Calif Law School students…
Does California need more lawyers? I always thought the bar exam was a way to control the number entering the profession. Obviously, I am not a lawyer and know very little about them.
Just what we need, more underqualified lawyers.
The question of whether California needs more lawyers is irrelevant. The purpose of Bar Exams is supposed to be to to ensue some degree of competency. Keeping people out of the profession is really against public policy. And really tough standards on an exam that demands memorization and quick recall in a profession where ( unlike , say medicine) you are not supposed to say or do anything til you have looked it up to ensure it’s still the way things are done … there are no emergencies in the medical sense… makes no sense.
Agree.
Disagree. Quite frankly, keeping people out of the profession can not only be good public policy but is also beneficial to them. The fact is that 50% of all JD grads cannot find a legal job – there is no need, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The fact that California has the highest pass rate of the 50 states is neither here nor there. If CA lowers the pass rate, another state becomes the most difficult. It’s a zero-sum game.
Easier passing standards just encourage more law schools to exist, which is definitely bad public policy since many/most(?) grads end up with massive debt and zero chance of finding a job requiring a JD.
One of the reasons often cited for the difficulty of California’s Bar exam* is because of the large presence of non-ABA law schools in the state with minimal admission requirements (Believe they have some sort of state accreditation).
It’s also a reason why law students who attend the non-ABA accredited law schools must also take the “baby bar” exam after 1L…to minimize to the extent possible the chances underqualified law students are able to get a license to practice law in the state.
- It's considered the most difficult bar exam in the country by lawyers/law students I've known.
@bluebayou I have to respectfully disagree. People make a choice to go into law school. They already had an undergraduate degree, they could have just left it there lol. If somebody cannot do the research to see that the legal profession is oversaturated, then it sounds like maybe it’s their own fault when they don’t get a job?
Caveat emptor? Absolutely.
But, don’t forget: ‘there’s one born every second.’ 
Just read the law school blogs where the masses assume they’ll be in the top decile, so they will be the lucky ones to find a job, unlike the bottom half of the class. Perfect analysis for the snowflakes. lol
But seriously, most folks do not do any more research than just reading the fancy websites of the law schools which for some reason, tend to ignore jobs, jobs, jobs.
Personally, I’m all for folks doing thier own thing on their own dime, but instead they go to LS and incur hundreds of thousands in non-dischargeable debt (federal loans) but still can’t find a legal job. It’s a moral hazard and bad public policy, IMO.
Just so it’s clear, Hastings is a very competitive law school which is also “cheap” since it’s a UC. It literally draws the most accomplished candidates (I didn’t get in back in the day, fyi.) And Hastings had only a 51% pass rate for first time takers. That means, to me, that there’s something wrong with the test. I am an attorney in Oakland and see these students applying to my firm on a regular basis. One of our associate attorneys graduated there, and he is highly thought of by all judges we work with. In other words, Hastings puts out a very good product. So, “easier” is a relative term. I don’t anticipate those lacking true skills and knowledge as being able to pass even this “easier” exam.
Say what? It must have been awhile since you’ve bee checking prices, but Hastings is $73k/yr instate. Private USC is only $12k more.
btw: I agree that Hastings should have a much better pass rate; it was 76% only three years ago. That is a precipitous drop in a few years. Academia just doesn’t move that fast.
Unless the test changed drastically in that time, and no one has suggested that it has, one can only assume that the test takers must have changed or the school is really failing its students.
http://www.uchastings.edu/admissions/jd/jd-fin-aid/index.php
Yeah, the test has actually changed that much. They just administered the “new” version of the test this year. We had a law clerk who didn’t pass the bar a few times pass the most recent. I mentored her for some of her time with our office and she is very capable and I believe has all the tools we want our legal professionals to possess. But, for whatever reason, she couldn’t pass the test until they changed the format recently. That’s BEFORE changing the scoring and making it “easier.” Limited sample, but…
(BTW, she took her oath and is now an entry level attorney in our office.)
A Law Professor, and critic of law schools in general, Paul Campos disagrees with you:
The Cal Bar is changing this summer to a two-day format, but recent iterations have been against nationally-normed and scaled tests.
What is most likely happening is that back when Hastings had an 80% first time pass rate (2010), most of its then students barely passed. (Yeah, I know a pass is a pass is a pass, particularly on the hardest test in the land, at least with pass score.)
But statistically if all of a sudden, the quality of the students decline slightly – and they have been declining everywhere, even at Harvard and Stanford, due to the massive decline in LS apps – those students who used to average barely passing, now end up barely not passing.
A valid argument. I’d suggest it be tempered, though, with recognizing that there’s a 2% change in incoming scores (if I’m reading the above correctly) followed by a 17%ish decrease in 1st time bar pass total. Although we can speculate that they were possibly barely passing before, I tend to be skeptical of drawing that conclusion. Generally speaking, Hastings still has a strong reputation in the Bay Area in practice, which I think offsets that conclusion.
UC Hastings is ranked #54 in US News. That’s not terrible, but it’s not great. I find it tacky of the dean to rant and blame others for his school’s graduates’ poor bar passage results–as if the school and the graduates themselves had nothing to do with it.
It should be made HARDER to pass the bar, which would result in fewer people going to law school and more law school closures. The legal education market has not adapted fast enough to the new reality: that there are far too many underqualified lawyers, and the market forcing closures of weak law schools would help this adaptation occur.
https://nyti.ms/2uft3qx
DS is a summer associate with a Silicon Valley law firm this summer and will be sitting for the CA bar next July. I am sure he will find this article interesting.
That’s hard to say with regards to big law as nearly all of their summer classes were stable or larger this year. And with the increase in the New York big law associate salary scale that most big firms quickly matched, these new lawyers will not be starving or pounding the pavement searching for a job.
@AvonHSDad: I’m not sure where you got the idea that summer classes are larger this year. Summer classes are actually down around [url=<a href=“http://www.americanlawyer.com/id=1202792282954/This-Year-Fewer-but-BetterPaid-Summer-Associates%5D2%%5B/url”>http://www.americanlawyer.com/id=1202792282954/This-Year-Fewer-but-BetterPaid-Summer-Associates]2%[/url]. That isn’t likely to change either, with flat demand and more in-sourcing.
Yes it does. But only Yale can circumvent basic math that shows that the high LSAT scorers are no longer applying to law school.
Per Paul Campos, who has crunched the numbers;
Note, 2010, was back in the dark ages when Hastings has a high pass rate of the bar (`80%). 2010 was also when Hastings had a bottom quartile LSAT score of 160. (see above for relevance) Today, Hastings top quartile is 161, with a bottom quartile coming in at 156, which is the 56th percentile. In other words, the top quartile of today’s Hastings class would have been at the bottom quartile just a few years ago. Is there any wonder that pass rates have declined?
Yes it does.
But the fact is that only Yale can circumvent basic math that shows that the high LSAT scorers are no longer applying to law school.
Per Paul Campos, who has crunched the numbers;
Note, 2010, was back in the dark ages when Hastings has a high pass rate of the bar (`80%). 2010 was also when Hastings had a bottom quartile LSAT score of 160. (see above for relevance) Today, Hastings top quartile is 161, with a bottom quartile coming in at 156, which is the 56th percentile. In other words, the top quartile of today’s Hastings class would have been at the bottom quartile just a few years ago. Is there any wonder that pass rates have declined?
Also, as someone who recruits in the bay area, people are starting to question their Hastings recruitment.
@Demosthenes49 - My comment was based solely on anecdotal comments from our son who was referring to his summer firm, his two roommate’s summer firms, and two of his classmates from his LS who are also in the bay area at different firms. I don’t doubt that the overall figures are down nationally from what I have seen in various articles…