Bar Exams and Law School Courses
Freakonomics Blog (which I read less and less now that the RSS feed serves up only excerpts, thanks to the NY Times) points me to a paper accepted for publication in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Legal Education. Douglas Rush and Hisako Matsuo examine ((
Does Law School Curriculum Affect Bar Examination Passage? An Empirical Analysis of the Factors Which Were Related to Bar Examination Passage between 2001 and 2006 at a Midwestern Law School , full paper available in PDF
))whether success or failure on the Missouri bar exam is correlated to the courses taken by a student while at law school — i.e. does taking a commercial law course in law school help you pass the commercial law bar exam? They find that it does not. Unsurprisingly the predictor of success was your position in your law school class.
What interested me was the assertion by Rush, quoted in Freakonomics Blog, that:
The “conventional wisdom” among law school faculties and deans is that law students, especially law students who academically rank low in their class, should take as many of the courses whose subject matter is tested on state bar exams (i.e. contracts, torts, property, etc.) as possible in order to improve their chance of passing state bar exams
That may be true for law schools in the U.S., but it sure wasn’t the case at Osgoode, and, I’d suggest, would not be the faculty or decanal wisdom at other Canadian law schools either. We did everything in our power to persuade students that there was no need whatsoever to let the bar admission course subjects influence their course selection; but our power was really nothing against the wisdom of the student crowd, which declined this freedom en masse and chose the predictable program of study.
Of course, the issue here was not so much passing the exams (California has a high failure rate; Canadian bars a very small one; don’t know about Missouri) as it was getting through the bar admission course with the minimum of effort. And who could blame the battle weary students, already carrying the burden of seven years of postsecondary education, for seeking all possible ways of lightening their load?
Now that there is simply a bar exam (here in Ontario at least) my guess is that students will be even more conservative in their law school choices, if that’s possible; and studies such as this one will fail to make even the slightest dent in their resolve.
As someone who “receives” the graduates of Ontario law schools, I strongly advise those students whom I encounter to take the “basic” courses, particularly Conflicts. Students who choose to article at a firm that does principally corporate commercial work are at a huge disadvantage if they are unfamiliar with basic corporate and commercial law. It is, in my opinion, next to impossible for a student who has not taken conflicts to make sense – not that any conflicts solution, at least as regards choice of law, can ever really be said to make sense – of the conflicts problem that he or she is certain to encounter as a student. It seems to me that the rejection by the students of the faculty’s advice is based, not on whether they will pass any exam, but on what will enable them to do what they are certain to be asked to do when they article. The problem would, of course, be largely solved if first year were 75% Contracts – the only law school course that really matters!
I know that I shall be condemned as a crass Philistine – am I being politically incorrect if there are still Philistines that I might offend? – for saying what I have just said, but I hold the view, unpalatable as it may be to many academics, that a relevant question to ask with respect to any law school course is whether it will help the students give better advice to their clients.
That being said, as someone like David Cheifetz continually demonstrates, there is, in fact, far less of a chasm between “academic” law and “law in practice” than is often assumed.
The problem would, of course, be largely solved if first year were 75% Contracts – the only law school course that really matters!
Fighting words John – so Chicago has won, and all that matters is the interpretation of intention and the allocation of risk within bilateral economic relations.
Didn’t there used to be something called public law, about constraints on the power of the state. And a few other courses as well.
Or is it just that there aren’t books out there on the subject of the calibre of this one.
That’s at least because my clients seem to have decided that they have other lawyers to whom they send the easy & profitable cases to.
John has written the good write. Now it’s up to practitioners, judges, and academics to make certain we all pay attention. If we do, that’ll be less work for my part of the profession. Rest assured we’ll find other ways to trouble society. After all so many of us are heard to complain vocally about how we’d rather be doing something else (implicitly, equally profitable).
John wrote:
Much of law is like religion. The only way one can deduce principles on an a priori basis is if somebody tells you what those principles are and they you accept them on faith. That’s also true, sometimes, about the “correct” result in some cases and its validity, both in the procedural (is the process used to arrive at the answer sound) and substantive (is the answer, itself, sound).