Bar Exam Research Articles

Reasonable Accommodations on the Bar Exam: Leveling the Playing Field or Providing an Unfair Advantage?

If you ask law students what they think about examination accommodations provided to students with disabilities, including learning disabilities, most students will tell you that it is unfair that some students get more time to take an examination. The misconception that accommodations provide an unfair advantage may stem from the fact that not all students understand the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”), its purpose, and reasons why individuals receive such accommodations. In fact, the ADA has applications beyond the employment context. Specifically, the ADA ensures that students with disabilities who graduate from medical school, law school, and other professional programs cannot be discriminated against in their educational programs and are entitled to “nondiscrimination and reasonable accommodation in the licensing process.” This article suggests, because of the ADA Amendments Act of 2008 (“ADAAA”), more students should now be able to qualify for reasonable accommodations in the bar exam setting. Part One of this article discusses the background of the ADA, the Amendments and how the various state bar examinations are implicated. The New York State Bar exam, whose treatment of accommodation requests typifies state bar exam practices, is a principal focus. In Part Two, this article analyzes how courts have decided ADA cases where law graduates were either not considered to be disabled or were denied the accommodations they sought before and after the 2008 Amendments. Part Two considers whether there will be future litigation in the ADA, higher-education, bar exam setting and how courts should handle such litigation.

Lowering the Bar to Raise the Bar: Licensing Difficulty and Attorney Quality in Japan

Under certain circumstance, a relaxation in occupational licensing standards can increase the quality of those who enter the industry. The effect turns on the opportunity costs of preparing for the licensing examination: making the test easier can increase the quality of those passing if it lowers the opportunity costs enough to increase the number of those willing to go to the trouble of taking the test. We explore the theoretical circumstances under which this can occur and the actual effect of the relaxation of the difficulty of the bar exam in Japan from 1992 to 2011.

Bar Passage: GPA and LSAT, Not Bar Reviews

Probit regressions of bar passage on law GPA, undergraduate GPA (uGPA) and LSAT show GPA to have a very strong relation, LSAT a weaker one, and uGPA not to have any relation. 1L and upperclass GPA both have strong predictive power, favoring an interpretation of significant learning in small and elective courses compared to the mandated large ones of the first year. Linear regressions of GPA on uGPA and LSAT show a noisy relation to exist only for first-time bar exam takers, none for 2nd time takers. Analysis of bar review courses does not show the choice among them to have consequence. Possible interpretations favor legal education over innate skill and the training in legal analysis over memorization.

What does and should influence the number of lawyers?

Before we can ask whether there are too many lawyers we must answer several preliminary questions: whom do we consider lawyers, and what does and should influence their number? The term ‘lawyer’, w...

The Return of John Moffat

The Return of John Moffat

Ranking Law Schools Using Reported California Bar Exam Results: Some Observations and Conjectures

Law school rankings are ubiquitous and inevitable. That should not be surprising, since they may help prospective law students decide where to study and prospective employers decide which law schools’ graduates to hire. Unfortunately, none of the existing law school rankings are substantially based on measures of student learning outcomes, and most are not helpful in evaluating the relative performance of non-elite law schools. This article attempts to fill the gap in the literature by ranking law schools using the California bar exam results reported by the State Bar of California for first-time takers over the period from 1997-2011 and especially 2007-2011. There are problems with this ranking too. The data are incomplete, the California bar exam has probably varied in difficulty over the period of the study, and bar exams probably do not adequately test law graduates’ preparation for the practice of law. Nonetheless, most law graduates need to pass a bar exam before they can obtain satisfying legal jobs. Moreover, bar exams arguably test law graduates on at least some of the knowledge and skills they will need to succeed in their legal careers. In these respects, at least, bar exam results provide a measure of student learning outcomes that should be important for most prospective law students. Some of the results of this study are interesting and surprising: Yale appears to outperform all other law schools, and Virginia and Emory appear to outperform their US News rankings. Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, Northwestern, and Cornell appear to underperform their US News rankings. There appears to be a surprisingly strong in-state advantage on the California bar exam, and Californian schools generally appear to outperform higher-ranked out-of-state schools, but some Californian schools appear to outperform others: USC, Pepperdine, Loyola, California Western, and Chapman all outperform Californian schools that the US News ranks higher; UC-Davis, UC-Hastings, and San Diego underperform Californian schools that the US News ranks lower. Some Californian schools had such low California bar passage rates over the period of this study that one can only wonder whether they might be at risk of accreditation problems, and some out-of-state schools had passage rates that were even lower and atrocious by any reasonable standards.

Helping Students Get it: How Law School Instructors Can Use Four Characteristics of Successful Second-Language Acquisition Pedagogy to Create Successful Law Students

Law students may come to law school with no training in how to learn. While many new legal educators have strong academic and professional experience, they may have little, if any, training in how to teach before teaching their first law school class. Because learning the law shares epistemological similarities to acquiring a second language, legal educators should apply four characteristics of successful second-language acquisition pedagogy to help law students evaluate and improve their learning skills. This article explains these characteristics, based on language acquisition theories, and how each characteristic applies to legal education, providing specific examples of strategies and techniques legal educators can use to help law students succeed. These characteristics will help make law students metacognitive about their legal education, thereby making them more likely to succeed on law school exams, on bar exams, and as practicing attorneys.

Guide to Materials for WV Bar Exam Preparation Created for the Academic Excellence Program

This guide will help you identify and find the most important bar preparation materials in the State of west Virginia.

The 'Americanization' of Legal Education in South Korea: Challenges and Opportunities

In 2007, Korea reformed its legal education system from one consisting of an undergraduate degree, “cram school,” and a national bar exam with a less than 5% pass rate, to an American-style three year graduate law school system. The reform was instituted to expand and diversify the legal profession in Korea and to meet the demands of an increasingly globalizing economy. The first class of students graduating from the new law schools in February 2012 will face an environment that is not yet prepared to accommodate them. In this article, I explore the economic, cultural and pedagogical challenges posed by the reform. I also discuss the opportunities afforded by adopting a law school model that is in the midst of being re-evaluated. I argue that Korean law schools should implement some key recommendations for reform in U.S. schools. By learning from the U.S. experience, Korea can develop its own effective legal education model.

Barrier to Enter the Legal Profession: How the Bar Exam Deprives the Public of Access to the Courts

The purpose of this literature review is to examine the utility of the bar exam. The paper discusses the supervision of the legal profession. In doing so, the paper addresses the role of the judiciary, the American Bar Association and to a limited extent, the legislature. The paper also highlights biases in the legal profession among judges and attorneys and explains how these biases restrict access to the courts both for practitioners as well as to the general public.

A Substantive Process Analysis of Responses to Items from the Multistate Bar Examination

We investigated examinees' cognitive processes while they solved selected items from the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE), a high-stakes professional certification examination. We focused on ascertaining those mental processes most frequently used by examinees, and the most common types of errors in their thinking. We compared the relationships between different problem-solving processes, errors, and performance, and assessed the degree to which performance was related to correspondence between examinees' and model problem-solving approaches. Participants most commonly solved problems with reference to legal principles and cues presented in problem stems, but also resorted to other mental processes. We found that performance on the MBE is strongly related to domain-specific skill in using legal principles, as well as to domain-general metacognitive skill in organizing thinking. Evidence that would suggest that testwiseness strategies or common-sense reasoning was a source of construct-irrelevant variance on the MBE was not found. Our study demonstrated a systematic method for in-depth analysis of examinee substantive processes on examinations such as the MBE that assess complex reasoning within a specific domain.

The Life and Times of Perry Mason: The Evolution of Today's Legal Thrillers

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2012 9 PHOTO: EVERETTCOLLECTION E rle Stanley Gardner lasted only one month in Indiana’s Valparaiso University law school. More interested in boxing than law, he organized illegal matches and later bragged he was suspended for punching a professor. Whatever happened, the school swiftly showed him the door. This didn’t augur well for a young man who had only completed high school and just entered his twenties. His story, however, took one of those twists stranger than his fiction . Gardner’s wealth and worldwide fame would come about because of his creation of fiction’s most famous lawyer, Perry Mason. Gardner was a tireless man who would accumulate seven pseudonyms and write over 150 novels, but first he studied law on his own while working as a typist. He passed the California Bar exam in 1911, about a year after leaving Valparaiso. He practiced for a while, getting whatever clients he could among the Chinese and Mexican immigrants, took a job as a tire salesman for a few years, then returned to the law, joining a firm in 1921. He began to write at night—thousands of words each night—banging away for two years before getting his first pulp publication . The floodgates opened. He became Black Mask’s most prolific author and appeared in many other magazines, both pulps and slicks. In 1932 he earned $20,000 writing short stories, no mean sum in the Depression and an enormous output in the heyday of a penny a word. Perry Mason’s debut came in 1933 with Gardner’s first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, and continued through eighty-nine titles, several of which were published after his death. The first screen appearance of Mason, starring Warren William, followed a year after his debut in The Case of the Howling Dog. Three others with William and then one TheLifeandTimesofPerryMason The Evolution of Today’s Legal Thrillers CRIME&MYSTERY INTERNATIONAL J. MADISON DAVIS Raymond Burr as Perry Mason in the CBS series that aired from 1957 to 1966. 10 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY with Ricardo Cortez followed. (Both of these actors share the distinction , coincidentally, of playing the Sam Spade character in pre-Bogart adaptations of The Maltese Falcon.) Warner Brothers played loose with Gardner’s characters. Perry Mason became a gourmet and a sophisticate, more like S. S. Van Dyne’s popular Philo Vance. Mason even marries his secretary Della Street in one of these movies, destroying the will-theywon ’t-they game Gardner played so successfully through years of the television series. Forawriterusuallymoreobsessed withpaychecks,Gardnerwasnothappy with Warner Brothers. He insisted on control of his characters in the future, a major reason CBS television’s Perry Mason (1957–68) was so successful. There was sufficient romantic possibility in Perry Mason that CBS also proposed a soap opera (which became The Edge of Night) based on the novels , but Gardner refused to let them use his characters’ names. He even exerted control over casting the television series. Raymond Burr generally played a “heavy,” like the murderer in RearWindow, a cop, or other such roles. He supposedly showed up to audition for Hamilton Burger, Mason’s nemesis, but Gardner took one look at Burr and immediately chose him as Mason, over network objections. Burr’s dark sex appeal attracted women viewers, widening the audience, and perhaps producing a significant shift in television to less pure heroes. To create Mason, Gardner had drawn from his own experiences at the inelegant end of the law. Mason never appeared in short stories, but one of Gardner’s continuing characters was attorney Ken Corning, who represents clients framed by corrupt police and officials. American crime fiction from the 1930s casts a skeptical eye on John Law, and police are uncommon as heroes until the postwar period. In 1937, incidentally, Gardner flipped the roles of his main characters by creating a series in which Doug Selby, district attorney, must outwit a crafty shyster. Mason, it must be said, is about 50 percent shyster himself, although he is always on the side of the innocent. As the novel series became more popular, Mason’s toughness softened to make him more palatable for serialization in the...

Talent matters: Judicial productivity and speed in Japan

To study the determinants of judicial productivity and speed (measured by published opinions), I examine all 348 trial-court civil medical malpractice opinions published in Japan between 1995 and 2004. For comparative purposes, I add 120 randomly selected civil judgments from the same period. The data cover 706 judges (about a third of the Japanese bench). I find: (A) Productivity (measured as published opinions per year on the bench) correlates with apparent intellectual ability and effort. The judges who attended the most selective universities, who passed the bar exam most quickly, and who were chosen by the courts for an elite career track publish the most opinions. (B) Adjudicatory speed (measured as time from filing to decision, for published opinions) may correlate with apparent ability and effort too (the evidence is weaker), but institutional experience counts as well. As the courts acquired increasing experience with malpractice cases, the pace of adjudication quickened.

Table of Contents

Abstract Cover Story Find ways to motivate staff when their salaries don't Keep DS providers motivated despite lack of pay raises with small but meaningful gestures Show yourself appreciation when your paycheck does not A Brief Conversation with … Joy L. Himmel Web‐based program educates faculty, staff about disabilities Of Counsel Revised ADA regulations create confusion regarding obligation to respond to student threats Collaboration Help campus administrators get comfortable working with students with disabilities Trends Prepare students with disabilities for bar exam accommodation challenges Managing Your Office Use ‘stay interviews’ to better retain your staff members Try these sample questions when conducting ‘stay interviews’ Etc. Report shows students with LD face myriad challenges UNIVERSAL DESIGN Quick tips for creating accessibility for all Help instructors find best timing for pop quizzes BEYOND ACCOMMODATION Prepare soon‐to‐be graduates for the workforce Legal Roundup ACCOMMODATION OCR agrees with university's refusal to provide specific request DISCRIMINATION University's investigation into vet's complaint misapplied legal standards POLICIES & PROCEDURES Medical leave of absence did not violate student's rights PERSONNEL Breast cancer not a disability under state law, court rules ACCOMMODATION Judge won't reopen case, cautions against refiling DISCRIMINATION Student lacks proof suspension was due to disorder DISMISSAL Judge lets stand conspiracy claims against college officials QUICK STUDY

Table of Contents

Abstract Cover Story Know where to find answers to overseas accommodation questions Find help accommodating students with disabilities who want to go overseas Know where to look for money for costly overseas accommodations Prepare students to deal with the unexpected A Brief Conversation with … Dave Tucker Assistive technology eliminates need for written notes Of Counsel Balance open‐enrollment policies with student realities, program requirements Policies & Procedures Ensure disability‐related procedures are clear, well publicized Compliance Consider students' requests for accommodations in all institutional programs, activities Understand your duty to students with psychiatric disabilities Managing Your Office Don't set new staff members up for failure with labeling Etc. Understand your obligations to students who have intellectual disabilities UNIVERSAL DESIGN Quick tips for creating accessibility for all Give students strategies to organize their lives BEYOND ACCOMMODATION Prepare students for life after college by fostering self‐advocacy skills Legal Roundup Know these key OCR rulings to ensure compliance ACCOMMODATION Blind law grad gets chance to take bar exam with JAWS® Court orders NCBE to provide computer‐based exam PERSONNEL Employee's testimony defeats disability claim QUICK STUDY

Failing Grade: Our Irrelevant Bar Exam

This article criticizes the California Bar Exam’s testing of real property. The author argues that the Exam fails to test modern issues relevant to everyday practice.

Will the Korean Law School System Succeed?

Korea began to implement an enormous legal educational change. The Korean government decided to introduce an American style law school (“Law School”) into Korea. It means Korea eventually will abolish its undergraduate level college of law and establish graduate level Law School. All of this effort comes from the desire to correct the fatal defects in the old legal education system. The main idea of this reform is to produce more internationally competitive lawyers for the preparation of the 21th century and to increase the quality of legal service toward Korean people by increasing the number of attorneys. To make Law School system successful in Korea, I suggest that we should investigate again what is really the appropriate number of lawyers in Korea by examining current and future needs using scientific and economic methods. Also, if there is any university in which the law professors develop great law materials or casebooks, the university also should get weight during the reevaluation of the approved program or additional permission process. As for the New Korean Bar Exam, it should consist of the basic and fundamental legal theories in each subject. Excessively difficult or trivial theories in subjects should not be the key in deciding whether the applicants pass or fail the Exam. If Korea establishes correspondence Law Schools with cheaper tuition and expense than regular Law Schools, the poor class can study law and become lawyers as well under the new system. The two-year practical training requirement after graduation can be too big a burden for newly admitted attorneys. Practice training such as summer associate programs or externship programs during the Law School years would be sufficient for that purpose. As any educational system has strong points and weak points, Korean society should keep a close eye on the operation of the Law School system. Law professors and lawyers in Korea should always consider the benefits to the general public and what is “Justice” in the whole process of the Korean judicial reform.

Washington’s Diploma Privilege

The author presents a history of the diploma privilege in Washington State, allowed graduates of certain Washington state law schools to join the bar upon graduation and without taking the bar exam.

The Bar Exam

This brief article criticizes the property essay question on the July 2005 bar exam for concentrating on covenants running with the land, which is a rare occurrence in everyday practice.

What Does—and Does Not—Ail State Constitutional Law

Open a course catalog at most law schools in the country, and you will find a course called “Constitutional Law.” If you happen to take that course, as indeed you must at most of these law schools, you will find one thing more -- that it teaches just one side of the story, focusing on the Federal Constitution, rarely mentioning, if mentioning at all, the constitutions of the fifty states.Why is that? In one sense, the most essential sense, state constitutional law is no less a form of American constitutional law than federal constitutional law. State constitutions, like the Federal Constitution, provide a blueprint for government, allocating authority among the branches of power, establishing the terms of office, and defining the terms of consent. State constitutions, no less than the Federal Constitution, thus establish charters of government that simultaneously empower and constrain: that set forth the rules for regulating the people of a state and limit this authority through liberty, property, structural, and other guarantees. In this sense, state constitutional law parallels federal constitutional law, doing everything the Federal Constitution does, just on a smaller scale.Just? The difference between the size of the territories covered by the one constitution and the other fifty no doubt helps to explain why state constitutional law is taken less seriously, why some might even ask whether state constitutional law amounts to “constitutional law” at all. But does scale alone provide the answer? Some state constitutions after all cover massive territories and populations themselves. In population, California would be the thirty-fourth largest country in the world, and Texas, whose people do not take this kind of thing lightly, would be the forty-eighth largest country in the world. Taken together, more to the point, the fifty constitutions cover all of the land mass and population covered by the United States Constitution, save for a few territories and a conspicuous district, providing a second set of constitutional powers and constraints that touch nearly every American.Scale, then, must be a partial answer, not a complete one. Else, the greatest constitution of all might be the Charter of the United Nations. Scale alone does not explain why most Americans do not know they live in a state with its own constitution. It does not explain why so few law schools teach state constitutional law. Why still fewer of the top-ranked law schools teach the subject. Why so few states place the topic on their bar exams. And it does not explain why many newly minted lawyers, licensed to practice law by individual states, not the United States, do not know what it means when they swear to uphold the Federal Constitution and their state constitution.At least four other features of state constitutional law, it seems to me, diminish it in the eyes of the legal profession: the undue length of most state constitutions; the ease with which they may be amended; the election of judges who interpret them; and lockstep interpretations of the state constitutions with the Federal Constitution. The point of this essay is to examine each critique -- dignifying some, responding to others -- and to place them all in the broader context of American constitutionalism.