Stephanie Enyart doesn’t want to be a law clerk indefinitely.
Enyart, who is working at Disability Rights Advocates in Berkeley, is legally blind. Since graduating in spring 2009, she’s been trying to take her bar and professional responsibility exams. And trying. And trying.
Enyart attempted to take the March, August and November multistate professional responsibility exams and the July multistate bar exam. All four times, she was denied accommodations she asked for, she told me.
The next time the tests are offered in February and March next year, Enyart is not going to take the same chance at rejection. The UCLA Law grad is suing The National Conference of Bar Examiners for discrimination against blind and low vision law school graduates. She’s asking to be able to use the same screen reading and screen magnification software she’s been using to get through law school (and at work) on the tests.
“I got all my accommodation for the California section – everything I requested,” she said, but not for the national segment. “It’s important to get my accommodations so that I can get on with my life … It’s not like you can take these tests anytime.”
The suit was filed this morning in the Northern District. Disability Rights Advocates is co-counsel with two out-of-state law firms working alongside the National Federation of the Blind. For more information, please see the press release.
When Drexel opened a law school in 2006, the climate of the legal industry was much different than it is today. (How you like them obvious apples?)
Back then, pressure from other schools and its own student body, who asked in the student newspaper, "what's taken you so long?" pushed Drexel over the edge into joining the ever-growing ranks of institutions looking to parlay undergraduate program success into a creation of a law school.
Of course, with a 2006 inaugural class, Drexel was right in the line of fire when the legal industry collapsed this year. More pressure was on for the school to produce prepared graduates, or, in a word, graduates who could pass the bar exam and put their best foot forward.
And amidst all that pressure, Drexel showed up. Or, its students did. The Legal Intelligencer is reporting that 90% of Drexel law grads passed the Pennsylvania bar exam in July. That pass rate was surpassed by only two other schools in the region: Temple and University of Pennsylvania. A resounding success for a baby school, one might say.
"It's particularly important in this job market to get students to pass the bar the first time through because it makes the job search" for places like small firms or government positions, where bar passage is often required, all the easier, Dean Roger Dennis said.
Dennis attributed this success to the school's focus on bar exam passage: the school has an in-house writing specialist to assist studying students, and a director of academic skills who triages with students who are showing signs of struggling and might be "in jeopardy of failing the bar."
Apparently, there are no Barbri girls in Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin legislature believes that graduates of the University of Wisconsin Law School and Marquette Law School are so well versed in Wisconsin law that it is unnecessary for them to take the Wisconsin bar exam.
The plaintiffs argue the bar exam is a burden faced by graduates of out-of-state law schools. They note that the fees for admission by bar exam are roughly double the fees for admission by diploma privilege. The plaintiffs allege a disparity of preparation for admission, arguing that the bar examination requires study of all the subjects listed in SCR 40.03 because all are potentially tested, but a Wisconsin law student can graduate without taking classes in all of them. An out-of-state applicant is further hindered in a way the Wisconsin law school graduate is not by the delay created by an exam administered just twice a year, they added.
The exemption does have some advocates, especially at The Daily Cardinal:
But simmering under the legal grounds of the lawsuit is the issue of whether the bar exam in really all that necessary for Wisconsin students. It would seem that a diploma proving you had completed three grueling years of legal study is a better indicator of one’s possible legal success than a single two-day exam. And considering that attorneys educated at Wisconsin law schools are only marginally more likely to be investigated for ethics complaints than other attorneys, it seems there is little statistical need to weed people out using the bar exam.
This Minnesotan is unimpressed.
There is a reason why most states require a law school diploma and a bar examination: competence.
This smells a lot like the loophole that I discovered as a high school student in Florida. In high school I had two options:
Take AP classes and suffer through a grueling exam in hopes of scoring a perfect "5" because my university might not give me credit for a "4" or,
Go to the community college in the evenings on my high school's dime and rack up A's that Florida colleges could notreject.
Of courseI opted to go to community college. A student who would not get any credit for their AP score of a "3" or "4"
could easily earn an A in the comparable community college course, which meant that out of state applicants to my university were grossly disadvantaged. I had a friend who started college with 90 credits through this dual enrollment program, whereas out-of-state students who took a boatload of AP classes typically started with only 20 or so credits, if they were lucky.
Was this unfair? Of course it was.
This in-state favoritism is exactly what is going on in Wisconsin. I’m sure that Wisconsin and Marquette are great law schools, but not everyone that manages to graduate law school is competent to practice. If Wisconsin schools are really that great at teaching their students, then their graduates will do as well on the bar as their Nordic neighbors.
Broken down by age group, the median salary of law grads who
never passed the bar was $32,000 before they reached the age of 30 (compared to
$48,000 for lawyers and $35,600 for college grads), $48,000 from the ages of 30
to 39 (compared to $64,000 for lawyers and $42,000 for college grads), $54,000
between the ages of 40 and 49 (compared to $83,600 for lawyers and $46,250 for
college grads), and $62,849 between the ages of 50 and 59 (compared to $86,400
for lawyers and $48,416 for college grads).
The article goes on to conclude that:
"Despite the resilience of the law grads who never passed
the bar . . . their law school experience wasn’t worth the cost."
Wait, what? But it gets better. Law schools should
take heed, because:
“Legal education may be a disservice for the significant group
of students that never pass a bar exam—a group whose composition can be
predicted fairly accurately before they’ve even begun law school,” she says.
“At the very least, law schools owe it to their prospective students to provide
candid information about the risks of attending law school.”
The data is interesting, but the article frames it as what I've
started calling the Professors' Fallacy; it makes a generalized observation
about a whole, then it proceeds to the conclusion that concrete advice should
be given in particular cases. In this case, it suggests that
"because people who share some similar traits to you fail the bar exam,
you weren't cut out for law school."
You all may have heard of Sara Granda, the UC Davis School of Law graduate whose application to take the July California Bar exam was denied due to a processing error. Sara is also quadriplegic.
I called Sara today, to talk about the decision of the State Bar to deny her application, and the long road ahead of her to the February exam. During our conversation, Sara got a call from her lawyer.
Sara will be joining all the other would-be lawyers at convention centers across the state tomorrow: she'll be taking the exam.
Sara sounded thrilled by the news, but also concerned. In the 10 days since the state bar's initial decision, she hasn't spent anytime studying. Instead, she's been dealing with the "overwhelming" outpouring of support and media attention.
"It just shows you how many people really care," she said. "I wouldn't give up. I never gave up."
(Sara's tenacity is something close to legendary, and her not giving up was mentioned several times in our conversation.)
In a pretty marked reversal from their recent comments that are basically akin to "oh, the rules apply to everyone!" the State Bar will allow Sara to take the exam, despite the fact that she paid her application fees via check rather than online (the original reason for the denial).
"It's a high-tech process, and people need to maneuver it successfully, and we can't be in the business of helping any one person out with it," he said. "That takes us down a path that ends up in a place we don't want to be. How do you then choose which ones to help and which you don't?"
"That seems like a big cop out," Sara said. "In my situation, there are two people, if that, who graduate a year."
For more on Sara's story, including the governor's involvement, check out the Cal Law story here (free reg. req.).
Hey, law students and recent grads. Think you've got it tough? Try being a husband, a father of three, a major in the Army Reserve getting ready to be deployed to Iraq, and a recent law school graduate getting ready to take the Michigan bar exam, which you almost miss because of said impending deployment.
Try being recent Thomas M. Cooley graduate Miles Gengler.
In true Army fashion, Gengler continued rolling along despite fighting a multi-front battle, and passed the two-day exam. Trouble is, he couldn't be sworn in to the state bar in a traditional ceremony.
That's because when he learned he was a eligible to practice law in May, Gengler was 6,000 miles away in Baghdad's Green Zone.
One of the downsides of the recent trend toward every Joe and his grandma developing an app for Facebook or the iPhone is that a lot of crap slips through. "What color is your aura" and "what kind of sausage are you" quizzes, and maps the allow you to track every public bathroom you use on your roadtrip back to Iowa over the summer. Great.
Aaron Tenzer, who according to LinkedIn is a 2009 graduate of Chapman, has brought the #barbri angst and the crap app trend full circle to their rightful union by developing a quiz on Facebook: Which BarBri Lecturer Are You? Ever-curious about the weird things law students do to fill up their spare time, I took it. I wasn't holding my breath, though, because the quiz has received a lowly 1 star out of 5 from users.
My result, and the questions for those not willing to add the app, after the jump.
I'll admit it: I really enjoy Twitter. I've had some brushes with comedic genius on the site (others, not my own), and I am so lazy that 140 characters actually feels like a feat once written. I also particularly enjoy searching the Twitter feeds for subject matter that interests me. Snack foods, Jay-Z, shopping in Los Angeles, reactions to plane crashes. A recent search of "#barbri" (inspired by a friend on my list who is currently in BarBri) resulted in some funny/sad/otherwise empathy-inducing finds:
@errorlesss: In the first hour of #BarBri tonight, the lecturer has referenced necrophilia, showering with Sharon Stone, and insulted Louisiana.
@markadams44: thinks there must be a better way to provide legal education. But maybe not. #barbri (And I'm not bashing Barbri.)
@jakblackwood: Another day of bullshit taped #Barbri lectures.... I hope I'm paying less than the guys seeing it live.
The February California bar exam results were released to the public this morning, with exam-takers hearing of their fate on Friday night (hope you all had a good weekend).
While it'll be 4-6 weeks before the State Bar releases the in-depth data and school by school analysis, there is one interesting bit of news: this sitting of the exam saw the second-lowest number of passers in 23 years. When you compare that to the July 2008 exam, which saw the highest number of passers in 11 years, you gotta wonder about the bipolar nature of it all. The February exam normally sees a lower passage rate than the July one, but from best in 11 years to second-worst in 23? Whoa.
Greetings, all. Just wanted to take a quick moment to point you in the direction of a new feature here on The Shark: our bar exam blog The Wringer.
The Wringer is a great landing page for those of you interested in distilling all of your Shark news down to one and only topic: the bar exam. On The Wringer you'll also find links to Cal Law's great free bar exam resources, the Bar Q&A.
Around the time of the publication of each exam's results (we'll be thinking of you tomorrow, February exam-takers!), Cal Law posts six questions from the exam, along with sample answers written by bar exam prep course instructors. These questions and answers are available free without registration, and can be found here and are linked to from The Wringer.
In addition, please check out The Wringer for a brand new advice column. Our first column, authored by Vivian Dempsey of The Writing Edge/Bar Boosters, answers an anonymous future exam-takers questions about the prep process.
If you'd like to get some free and strictly anonymous advice on either the test prep process or subject matter on the exam (!) from a test prep course instructor, please email us and we'll get your questions off to someone who can answer them. In the meantime, if there's anything you'd like to know about the California Bar Exam, leave me a comment and I'll get to researching.
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