Bar Exam Research Articles

Civil Procedure and the New Bar Exam

Civil Procedure and the New Bar Exam

The Secret Sauce: Examining Law Schools that Overperform on the Bar Exam

The Secret Sauce: Examining Law Schools that Overperform on the Bar Exam

Putting the Bar Exam on Constitutional Notice: Cut Scores, Race & Ethnicity, and the Public Good

Putting the Bar Exam on Constitutional Notice: Cut Scores, Race & Ethnicity, and the Public Good

Are Law Schools Cream-Skimming to Bolster Their Bar Exam Pass Rates? A Multilevel Regression Analysis Approach to Estimate How Attrition and Transfer Rates Affect Bar Passage

Are Law Schools Cream-Skimming to Bolster Their Bar Exam Pass Rates? A Multilevel Regression Analysis Approach to Estimate How Attrition and Transfer Rates Affect Bar Passage

Examining the Bar Exam: An Empirical Analysis of Racial Bias in the Uniform Bar Examination

The legal profession is among the least diverse in the United States. Given continuing issues of systemic racism, the central position that the justice system occupies in society, and the vital role that lawyers play in that system, it is incumbent upon legal professionals to identify and remedy the causes of this lack of diversity. This Article seeks to understand how the bar examination—the final hurdle to entering the profession— contributes to this dearth of diversity. Using publicly available data, we analyze whether the ethnic makeup of a law school’s entering class correlates to the school’s first-time bar passage rates on the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE). We find that higher proportions of Black and Hispanic students in a law school’s entering class are associated with lower first-time bar passage rates for that school in its reported UBE jurisdictions three years later. This effect persists after controlling for other potentially causal factors like undergraduate grade-point average (UGPA), law school admission test (LSAT) score, geographic region, or law school tier. Moreover, the results are statistically robust at a p-value of 0.01 (indicating just a 1% chance that the results are due to random variation in the data). Because these are school-level results, they may not fully account for relevant factors identifiable only in student-level data. As a result, we argue that follow-up study using data relating to individual students is necessary to fully understand why the UBE produces racially and ethnically disparate results.

What Is Quality? Advancing Value-Added Approaches to Assessing Law School Bar Exam Performance

What Is Quality? Advancing Value-Added Approaches to Assessing Law School Bar Exam Performance

The Pro Bono Penalty: Extracurricular Activities and Demographic Disparities in Bar Exam Success

The Pro Bono Penalty: Extracurricular Activities and Demographic Disparities in Bar Exam Success

The Pro Bono Penalty: Extracurricular Activities and Demographic Disparities in Bar Exam Success

The Pro Bono Penalty: Extracurricular Activities and Demographic Disparities in Bar Exam Success

Does the Bar Exam Protect the Public?

I study the effects of requiring lawyers to pass the bar exam on whether they are later publicly disciplined for misconduct. In the 1980s, by abolishing what is known as a diploma privilege, four states began to require graduates from all law schools to pass the bar exam. My research design exploits these events to estimate the effect of the bar passage requirement on the share of lawyers publicly sanctioned by state discipline bodies. I find that during the first decade of their careers lawyers licensed without a bar passage requirement are publicly sanctioned at similar rates to lawyers licensed after passing a bar exam. Small differences do begin to emerge after a decade, however, and larger though still modest differences form after two decades.

Intergenerational transmission in regulated professions and the role of familism

We study to what extent familism accounts for the intergenerational transmission of jobs in regulated professions, and we examine the relevance of social norms to counteract familism. Before 2004, local courts graded the Italian bar exams for lawyers, and after 2004, exams were randomly assigned to external courts for grading. We measure family ties with the number of successful candidates sharing a family name and law firm address with an already registered lawyer. We find that the number of new entrants with a family tie drops by at least 10%, while the number of new lawyers does not change, showing that familism accounts for an important part of the intergenerational transmission in our setting. We do not find significant differences across gender, but our results are stronger in areas with weak social norms, although these areas have lower rents from licenses, suggesting that weak social norms rather than economic incentives are the main determinants of familism.

Menstruation and the Bar Exam: Unconstitutional Tampon Bans


 
 
 Some states have policies that prevent bar exam candidates from bringing their own menstrual products to the test. Via social media, awareness of these policies achieved new heights in the weeks leading up to the July 2020 bar exam. A small number of jurisdictions responded to public criticism by permitting test takers to bring menstrual products with them to the exam, whether administered traditionally or remotely in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Not all states have adopted permissive policies, however. This Essay explains why outright bans on menstrual products at the bar exam likely are unconstitutional. So-called alternate policies, such as making menstrual products available in women’s restrooms, are inadequate. Only a “free-carry” policy for menstrual products is consistent with welcoming all qualified candidates to the legal profession, without regard to biology.
 
 

What's Law Got to Do With It? Dignity and Menstruation


 
 
 When I think about all that is wrong in the world—the threat to democracy in the United States, the persistent systemic and individually-inflicted racism, the devastation wrought by COVID-19—I find myself asking, “Why do I care so much about menstrual laws and policies?” The answer, I have realized, is quite simple: the failure of the government and private institutions to adopt sane, respectful, smart policies concerning menstruation is an affront to dignity.
 
 
 
 Myriad policies intruding on a menstruator’s right to dignity are described throughout this Symposium and include: failing to include menstrual products in emergency- preparedness or response packages; not supplying public school students with free access to quality products; denying free and ready access to such products to people who are incarcerated or detained through our country’s immigration policies; imposing state and use taxes on such products as though they are “non-essential” goods; and not permitting menstruators to bring their own products into the bar exam.
 
 
 
 
 

It’s Not Where You Start, It’s How You Finish: Predicting Law School and Bar Success

In this study, we examine the extent to which academic and student engagement factors explain law school grades and first-time bar exam performance. Applying fixed effects linear and logit modeling, our analysis leverages law student transcript data and responses to the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) among students from a diverse group of 20 law schools to estimate academic performance and odds of bar passage. Most notably, we find that GPA improvement during law school is associated with greater odds of passing the bar exam, particularly among students who struggle the most during the first semester. Furthermore, while we find that LSAT scores and undergraduate GPA are predictive (p < 0.05) of both law school performance and bar success (as in previous research), these effects are quite modest. Based on these findings, we propose and discuss several recommendations. These should be helpful to higher education scholars and practitioners, particularly law school deans, administrators, faculty, and academic support staff.

Separate but Faithful: The Christian Right’s Radical Struggle to Transform Law and Legal Culture. By Amanda Hollis-Brusky and Joshua C. Wilson

The struggle is real for the three law schools at the heart of Amanda Hollis-Brusky and Joshua Wilson’s latest work, as their subtitle indicates. In a book that brings together thorough institutional histories, insightful interviews, and compelling data, the authors examine three law schools founded for the explicit purpose of advancing the legal objectives of Christian conservatism: Regent Law School (founded by the Pentecostal media mogul Pat Robertson in 1986), Ave Maria Law School (founded in 2000 by the Catholic Thomas Monaghan, who made his fortune with Domino’s Pizza), and Liberty Law School (founded in 2004 by the Baptist former Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell, Sr.). Yet instead of initiating a sea change in American law, these institutions often struggled just to stay afloat. In the early 2000s, Regent had an abysmal Bar exam pass rate for its graduates. In 2016, Ave Maria was sanctioned by the American Bar Association for its lax admission standards. And of the mere 311 citations to articles in the Liberty University Law Review, 41 percent came from authors at Liberty.

Preparing Silver Linings for a Cloudy Day: The Consequences of Preemptive Benefit Finding.

Waiting for important news is stressful. In four studies, we assess the utility of preemptive benefit finding, a coping strategy in which people seek silver linings in bad news before receiving news, for emotional well-being across several waiting periods (waiting for bar exam results, the outcome of political elections, and results of a fictitious health risk assessment). Our findings support the effectiveness of preemptive benefit finding while waiting, such that identifying benefits in bad news while waiting predicts more positive emotions during the wait (Studies 3 and 4) and buffers people against the emotional consequences of bad news by boosting post-news positive emotions (Studies 2-4). Importantly, engaging in preemptive benefit finding does not backfire if a person ultimately receives good news (Studies 1, 3, and 4). We discuss results from a mini meta-analysis and consider implications of our findings for interventions to improve well-being while waiting and after news arrives.

Selected Developments in Biotechnology Law and the Biotechnology Industry

Selected Developments in Biotechnology Law and the Biotechnology Industry

Bar exam takers amidst the COVID 19 pandemic.

Bar exam takers amidst the COVID 19 pandemic.

QUIZMASTER 20 QUESTIONS: POINT OF LAW UBE BAR REVIEW QUESTIONS

This eBook provides detailed authoritative answers to the 21 released MBE questions from the National Conference of Bar Examiners. Detailed explanatory answers to actual questions asked on past bar exams. Why the wrong answers are incorrect, why the right answers are right. Use of these questions does not constitute an endorsement by the NCBE. Dr. Engle's doctrinal materials are available at: http://amazon.com/author/quizmaster

Do We Need a Bar Exam... for Experienced Lawyers?

The fierce determination to require a bar exam during the COVID-19 pandemic left quite an impression on new lawyers entering the profession. State bars and state supreme courts made their position clear: the bar exam provides a screening function necessary to safeguard the public. Many disagreed.Even a cursory look at attorney discipline reveals that the lawyers who get into disciplinary trouble are not mostly new lawyers. The lawyers who get into trouble tend to be more experienced lawyers, who have not had any formal or objective tests of their ability to function since their original bar exam pass. The only check on their performance is discipline after harm has been done.Regulators deem the bar exam and character and fitness as necessary tests at the entry gate to the profession. As I contend in this Article, however, evidence supports regular administration of these tests throughout lawyer careers, not just at the beginning. I challenge the profession to consider whether the entirety of the current regime for assuring lawyer competency and quality can be improved to serve the public.

Reexamining Relative Bar Performance as a Function of Non-Linearity, Heteroscedasticity, and a New Independent Variable

One might think that if a law school’s graduates do better on the bar exam than their credentials on entering law school would have predicted, the law school’s faculty must have done a good job. Indeed, some scholarship makes that claim. But it is empirically untrue. What actually yields such superficially impressive results is not pedagogy but rather prestidigitation. When law schools manipulate their matriculant pools via academic attrition and transfer, that sleight of hand improves their bar performance rates. This article reveals the math behind the magic. We challenge the assertion that effective pedagogy is the primary driver of a school’s overperformance on the bar examination by demonstrating the model misspecification of the linear regressions in support of that assertion. Our analyses, based on original code written for the program Mathematica, generate regression equations that clearly illustrate the error of applying linear regression to heteroscedastic, non-linear data, and the bias in favor of schools with mid-range LSAT and UGPA matriculants this misapplication causes. Over and under performance on the bar examination, relative to the entering credentials of a school’s matriculants, can be explained in large part by combining the institutions’ academic attrition and net transfer rates into a single independent variable. We demonstrate the marked difference in the value of this variable between schools identified as overperforming and those identified as underperforming their matriculation credentials on the bar examination. The article concludes by emphasizing the harm to legal education that stems from the unwarranted attribution of bar success to pedagogy and especially the harm this causes to untenured academic support faculty. We also raise the question of whether ABA standard 316-mandating a certain level of bar passage by law schools’ graduates-is ethically and morally supportable given the ability of schools to manipulate bar passage rates by modulating academic attrition and transfer rates.