7 ms·

Abolish the bar? Wut? Why? Because its hard?

Karsteski 4y ago
Something something gatekeeping by old people
srndsnd 4y ago
I am not a lawyer nor do I have a JD, but the argument I've heard from friends who have recently passed the bar amounts to the idea that the inordinate amounts of memorization required to pass the bar are a poor measure of someone's ability to actually practice law. Worse than that, if a lawyer were to attempt to give advice without consulting any outside resources and not doing any research, that could be construed as malpractice. As a result, you could argue it even encourages that kind of behavior. Yet, that is what the bar exam asks. I've seen countless takedowns on HN of programming interviews on whiteboards as a poor way to evaluate someone's ability to write code. Same concept, different domain. Similarly to those programming interviews, it can also be seen as a "best of the worst" situation.
- coding123 4y ago
  I get that a whiteboard code test at Google would be probably very hard. A whiteboard (err, screen share) code test at my company would be fucking bubble sort. Yes there's a 100k/year difference in pay more at Google.
- gamblor956 4y ago
  The bar exam is nothing like a whiteboard. It tests knowledge (law is a knowledge-based profession), and skill (the writing portions test an applicant's ability to write legal documents). As a lawyer, I've found that anyone who could not pass the bar was simply unsuited to providing legal advice, and are generally even unsuited to doing any legal-related task for pay. The bar exam sets a minimum threshold for a person's ability to research, and remember, large quantities of rules, applications, and theories, and be able to apply or regurgitate all of that within a short time frame. This is similar to real world demands, such as a trial, or contract negotiations, where the lawyer will not have time to go back-and-forth researching every new thing that pops up during the event and must go into it fully prepared ahead of time.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    As a lawyer, how do you feel about the need to have graduated from a 3-year law school (in almost all states, with the exception for some that have a longer apprenticeship program) to even take the bar? It seems like if the bar is a sufficient screen it would be unnecessary.
    - coding123 4y ago
      As a customer of a lawyer It seems like an absolute requirement for me. Why is everyone trying to erode society down to like, nothingness? Burger flipper to 400k/year lawyer anyone?
      - barneygale 4y ago
        Could you /imagine/ a world without lawyers? shudders
        HWR_14 4y ago
        > Could you /imagine/ a world without lawyers? Yes, I can. And, frankly, it sucks. I don't do my own roofing. The idea that I would have to argue my own case in court sounds horrible. I don't know how. And then the people who right now are (or become) lawyers would just use their superior system knowledge to extort others. Far better that the responses available to a claim of some tort are "I guess I should call a lawyer" and not "I guess I should pay $5,000 for this to go away or spend the next 2 years learning the law to fight it on my own."
      - spoiler 4y ago
        I think they're pointing out the ridiculous costs of law school and the wealth barrier of entry that creates. Someone who could pass the bar exam, and could end up being a great lawyer isn't even given the chance, because they can't afford to attend law school (which is necessary to take the exam, from what I gather, but IANAL & I'm not from the US).
        4y ago
- edmcnulty101 4y ago
  I would personally not want to go to a lawyer that is not able to pass the bar exam. Even if it's just an IQ check, I would want my lawyer to have a high IQ, social Darwinism or not. I wish law had more certification tests like medicine has with its specialties. I also think law school should be optional like it is in California or not costing $50,000 a year... that's just gate keeping and puts lawyers in massive financial debt or only selects for the rich.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    > Even if it's just an IQ check, I would want my lawyer to have a high IQ, social Darwinism or not. You can have a high IQ and be terrible and memorizing and regurgitating a bunch of facts and figures. I've seen people who were literal geniuses fail tests that others who were... lets say, 'very much not geniuses' passed without a problem because they were skilled in cramming for a few weeks to get their certification even while never having a real deep understanding of the subject and pretty much immediately forgetting everything they "learned". IQ (for what it's worth) is more about being able to figure out what's in front of you than it is having a great memory for numbers, trivia, dates, or laws and past legal cases.
    - watwut 4y ago
      If you are terrible at memorizing, you won't be good layer. They do actually need to remember a lot and quickly. And they don't have time to look up everything either.
      - autoexec 4y ago
        Not being a lawyer I can only assume the ideal is to be able to keep a lot of details and legal history in your head while also being able to apply what you know in creative and unexpected ways. From my limited exposure to the profession, it seems like some aspects of legal work might require someone to spontaneously recall vast amounts of information, but much of it also seems to leave plenty of time for research and deep contemplation. The legal system in the US often moves at a glacial pace and legal requests, responses, strategies, and defenses can be crafted carefully and with a lot of time, research, and billable hours going into them. It makes me think that a person could be a good lawyer without the ability to recall a bunch of the types of specifics you'd need to pass the bar, although it might limit their utility leaving them better suited for some tasks than others. It seems like the issue comes up a lot in talks about AI replacing lawyers. Computers would certainly be better at remembering details, adhering to protocol, processing large volumes of evidence, and recalling relevant laws and the past cases dealing with them, as well as all kinds of analysis humans would struggle with, but I've often seen it argued that while AI might be really great at that kind of thing, exceptional human lawyers need problem solving skills and the ability to apply that information in ways computers would struggle with or never consider. The context is usually that robot lawyers might make legal assistance more accessible and affordable for many people, but those having to depend on it could also end up highly disadvantaged when up against expensive AI-backed human legal teams. As AI and automation become increasingly used by law firms, or as it starts to actually replace lawyers, I wonder if the bar requirement could end up excluding exactly the kind of people who might better augment the computer systems.
- Maultasche 4y ago
  I don't know much about the bar exam myself, but I had a professor in college who was also a practicing lawyer. He was of the opinion that in order to pass the bar, you mainly needed to really know the legal fundamentals and be good at making a legal argument in the bar exam, and that knowledge of specific laws is less important, because those are always available in reference books. He told us a story of passing the Massachusetts bar exam (just to see if he could) without knowing anything about the state laws in Massachusetts, and won a bet he had made with his friend, who didn't think it was possible.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- D13Fd 4y ago
  What you have to do to pass the bar, even now, is extremely basic by lawyer standards. It's the floor. It is not like a programming whiteboard interview. It's a test that you study for, learning basic legal concepts, and knowing exactly the range of topics that are going to be on the test. I know many disagree, but in my opinion you need those basic legal concepts to practice law well. Everyone likes to say "well what if I just want to do family law?" No. You should still have to know the basics of law, because many of these issues will come up in your time as a lawyer, regardless of your area of practice. This is not advanced stuff, and it is not at all unfair to say that every lawyer should have a basic understanding of it. Bad lawyers make everyone's job harder, and make every case more expensive for clients on both sides. If you think legal cases are expensive now, just wait until they relax the licensing requirements.
riskable 4y ago
To be fair, the Bar exists because lawyers themselves felt there were too many lawyers.
xtracto 4y ago
What should be abolished is those crappy proctoring applications. Either implement remote-friendly tests or do as TOEFL has done since decades and apply tests at controlled locations.
rhino369 4y ago
The bar exam weeds people out at the wrong point--after they've racked up 300k in loans. They should just set a minimum LSAT score to achieve the same purpose. Or better yet, make a JD a Bachelor of Law degree without weeding out.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  But then how do you weed people out?
  - rhino369 4y ago
    Let the market decide. Nobody is going to hire someone with shit grades from a lowly ranked school. But instead of having 300k in debt, those unemployable Bachelor of Law grads will be no worse off than if they had a BA in an unmarketable field like sociology or poli-sci. Right now, they have to go get the the BA in anything (most do stuff like poli-sci) AND then they have to go spend 3 years and 300k dollars on a professional degree. The glut of lawyers isn't really a problem without all that wasted time and debt.
t_mann 4y ago
Requirements like the bar exam exist also to protect the insiders who also happen to make the rules. In economics it's called an insider-outsider problem. Not saying we should actually abolish the bar, just hinting at a possible reasonable argument.
- ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
  also called regulatory capture
  - t_mann 4y ago
    I'd say that's something different. Regulatory capture is when a regulator who is supposed to be outside the system gets drawn into it (like a banking regulator who gets defensive about a flawed risk model by a bank after they've given their approval). Bar associations are by definition run by people who are part of the system.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]

Something something gatekeeping by old people

I am not a lawyer nor do I have a JD, but the argument I've heard from friends who have recently passed the bar amounts to the idea that the inordinate amounts of memorization required to pass the bar are a poor measure of someone's ability to actually practice law. Worse than that, if a lawyer were to attempt to give advice without consulting any outside resources and not doing any research, that could be construed as malpractice. As a result, you could argue it even encourages that kind of behavior. Yet, that is what the bar exam asks. I've seen countless takedowns on HN of programming interviews on whiteboards as a poor way to evaluate someone's ability to write code. Same concept, different domain. Similarly to those programming interviews, it can also be seen as a "best of the worst" situation.

coding123 4y ago
I get that a whiteboard code test at Google would be probably very hard. A whiteboard (err, screen share) code test at my company would be fucking bubble sort. Yes there's a 100k/year difference in pay more at Google.
gamblor956 4y ago
The bar exam is nothing like a whiteboard. It tests knowledge (law is a knowledge-based profession), and skill (the writing portions test an applicant's ability to write legal documents). As a lawyer, I've found that anyone who could not pass the bar was simply unsuited to providing legal advice, and are generally even unsuited to doing any legal-related task for pay. The bar exam sets a minimum threshold for a person's ability to research, and remember, large quantities of rules, applications, and theories, and be able to apply or regurgitate all of that within a short time frame. This is similar to real world demands, such as a trial, or contract negotiations, where the lawyer will not have time to go back-and-forth researching every new thing that pops up during the event and must go into it fully prepared ahead of time.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  As a lawyer, how do you feel about the need to have graduated from a 3-year law school (in almost all states, with the exception for some that have a longer apprenticeship program) to even take the bar? It seems like if the bar is a sufficient screen it would be unnecessary.
  - coding123 4y ago
    As a customer of a lawyer It seems like an absolute requirement for me. Why is everyone trying to erode society down to like, nothingness? Burger flipper to 400k/year lawyer anyone?
    - barneygale 4y ago
      Could you /imagine/ a world without lawyers? shudders
      - HWR_14 4y ago
        > Could you /imagine/ a world without lawyers? Yes, I can. And, frankly, it sucks. I don't do my own roofing. The idea that I would have to argue my own case in court sounds horrible. I don't know how. And then the people who right now are (or become) lawyers would just use their superior system knowledge to extort others. Far better that the responses available to a claim of some tort are "I guess I should call a lawyer" and not "I guess I should pay $5,000 for this to go away or spend the next 2 years learning the law to fight it on my own."
    - spoiler 4y ago
      I think they're pointing out the ridiculous costs of law school and the wealth barrier of entry that creates. Someone who could pass the bar exam, and could end up being a great lawyer isn't even given the chance, because they can't afford to attend law school (which is necessary to take the exam, from what I gather, but IANAL & I'm not from the US).
      - 4y ago
edmcnulty101 4y ago
I would personally not want to go to a lawyer that is not able to pass the bar exam. Even if it's just an IQ check, I would want my lawyer to have a high IQ, social Darwinism or not. I wish law had more certification tests like medicine has with its specialties. I also think law school should be optional like it is in California or not costing $50,000 a year... that's just gate keeping and puts lawyers in massive financial debt or only selects for the rich.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > Even if it's just an IQ check, I would want my lawyer to have a high IQ, social Darwinism or not. You can have a high IQ and be terrible and memorizing and regurgitating a bunch of facts and figures. I've seen people who were literal geniuses fail tests that others who were... lets say, 'very much not geniuses' passed without a problem because they were skilled in cramming for a few weeks to get their certification even while never having a real deep understanding of the subject and pretty much immediately forgetting everything they "learned". IQ (for what it's worth) is more about being able to figure out what's in front of you than it is having a great memory for numbers, trivia, dates, or laws and past legal cases.
  - watwut 4y ago
    If you are terrible at memorizing, you won't be good layer. They do actually need to remember a lot and quickly. And they don't have time to look up everything either.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      Not being a lawyer I can only assume the ideal is to be able to keep a lot of details and legal history in your head while also being able to apply what you know in creative and unexpected ways. From my limited exposure to the profession, it seems like some aspects of legal work might require someone to spontaneously recall vast amounts of information, but much of it also seems to leave plenty of time for research and deep contemplation. The legal system in the US often moves at a glacial pace and legal requests, responses, strategies, and defenses can be crafted carefully and with a lot of time, research, and billable hours going into them. It makes me think that a person could be a good lawyer without the ability to recall a bunch of the types of specifics you'd need to pass the bar, although it might limit their utility leaving them better suited for some tasks than others. It seems like the issue comes up a lot in talks about AI replacing lawyers. Computers would certainly be better at remembering details, adhering to protocol, processing large volumes of evidence, and recalling relevant laws and the past cases dealing with them, as well as all kinds of analysis humans would struggle with, but I've often seen it argued that while AI might be really great at that kind of thing, exceptional human lawyers need problem solving skills and the ability to apply that information in ways computers would struggle with or never consider. The context is usually that robot lawyers might make legal assistance more accessible and affordable for many people, but those having to depend on it could also end up highly disadvantaged when up against expensive AI-backed human legal teams. As AI and automation become increasingly used by law firms, or as it starts to actually replace lawyers, I wonder if the bar requirement could end up excluding exactly the kind of people who might better augment the computer systems.
Maultasche 4y ago
I don't know much about the bar exam myself, but I had a professor in college who was also a practicing lawyer. He was of the opinion that in order to pass the bar, you mainly needed to really know the legal fundamentals and be good at making a legal argument in the bar exam, and that knowledge of specific laws is less important, because those are always available in reference books. He told us a story of passing the Massachusetts bar exam (just to see if he could) without knowing anything about the state laws in Massachusetts, and won a bet he had made with his friend, who didn't think it was possible.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
D13Fd 4y ago
What you have to do to pass the bar, even now, is extremely basic by lawyer standards. It's the floor. It is not like a programming whiteboard interview. It's a test that you study for, learning basic legal concepts, and knowing exactly the range of topics that are going to be on the test. I know many disagree, but in my opinion you need those basic legal concepts to practice law well. Everyone likes to say "well what if I just want to do family law?" No. You should still have to know the basics of law, because many of these issues will come up in your time as a lawyer, regardless of your area of practice. This is not advanced stuff, and it is not at all unfair to say that every lawyer should have a basic understanding of it. Bad lawyers make everyone's job harder, and make every case more expensive for clients on both sides. If you think legal cases are expensive now, just wait until they relax the licensing requirements.

riskable 4y ago

To be fair, the Bar exists because lawyers themselves felt there were too many lawyers.

xtracto 4y ago

What should be abolished is those crappy proctoring applications. Either implement remote-friendly tests or do as TOEFL has done since decades and apply tests at controlled locations.

rhino369 4y ago

The bar exam weeds people out at the wrong point--after they've racked up 300k in loans. They should just set a minimum LSAT score to achieve the same purpose. Or better yet, make a JD a Bachelor of Law degree without weeding out.

fallingknife 4y ago
But then how do you weed people out?
- rhino369 4y ago
  Let the market decide. Nobody is going to hire someone with shit grades from a lowly ranked school. But instead of having 300k in debt, those unemployable Bachelor of Law grads will be no worse off than if they had a BA in an unmarketable field like sociology or poli-sci. Right now, they have to go get the the BA in anything (most do stuff like poli-sci) AND then they have to go spend 3 years and 300k dollars on a professional degree. The glut of lawyers isn't really a problem without all that wasted time and debt.

t_mann 4y ago

Requirements like the bar exam exist also to protect the insiders who also happen to make the rules. In economics it's called an insider-outsider problem. Not saying we should actually abolish the bar, just hinting at a possible reasonable argument.

ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
also called regulatory capture
- t_mann 4y ago
  I'd say that's something different. Regulatory capture is when a regulator who is supposed to be outside the system gets drawn into it (like a banking regulator who gets defensive about a flawed risk model by a bank after they've given their approval). Bar associations are by definition run by people who are part of the system.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]