What's the bar exam like anyway?

Summary

Stuff You Should Know – "What's the Bar Exam Like Anyway?"

Hosts: Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant
Date: December 4, 2025
Episode Focus: An in-depth exploration of the bar exam—its history, structure, controversies, and cultural significance in the U.S.—with Josh and Chuck’s signature humor and curiosity.

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Josh and Chuck tackle the surprisingly complicated, storied, and often controversial bar examination required to practice law in the United States. Prompted by a listener’s suggestion, they break down the origins of the test, its evolution, the mechanics of how it works today, criticisms (both historic and current), recent scandals, and alternatives to the traditional bar path. Woven throughout are memorable anecdotes, stats, and candid reflections on the true value (and drawbacks) of this infamous legal hurdle.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why the Bar Exam Exists & Listener Prompt

• Rowan Garendesi suggested the topic after seeing the chaos and extremity of bar exam stories.
• Chuck: “I think someone in Rowan’s life had taken the bar, and I think they realized that they didn't know much about it.” (03:08)

2. What is 'The Bar'?

• The “bar” is named for the physical railing dividing public from the business end in a courtroom (04:03).
• Universal in legal professions globally, but shapes and requirements vary by jurisdiction.

3. Historical Origins

• Colonial/Early U.S.: No formal law schools or exams—lawyers apprenticed (07:04).
• Josh: “America wasn’t that far behind [England]... The first [bar exam] was Delaware in 1783... just hang out with a judge, and they would quiz you…” (07:46)
• Abraham Lincoln famously granted an attorney access to the bar after an informal chat—often, test-takers didn’t even know the exam was happening (08:59).

4. Rise of Written Exams & Standardization

• 1855: MA introduced the written bar; by 1920, written tests and law school as training became standard (09:16).
• 1972: The multistate bar exam (MBE)—introduces multiple-choice, attempts to standardize and objectify grading (11:12).
• Josh: “You can say, like, this is right, this is wrong. And it wasn’t just legal terms. They were applying it to hypothetical situations.” (11:26)

5. Built-in Inequity & Racial Discrimination

• Post-1912: the ABA screened black applicants to bar exam access for decades (13:29).
• National Bar Association (for black attorneys) founded in 1925 as a response.
• Chuck: “There seemed to be like a series of lawsuits from black lawyers... but I don't think many of those were successful.” (14:21)
• Cases like Tyler v. Vickery show the courts punting on direct discrimination claims, citing loopholes in labor law definitions (15:39–16:30).

6. Modernization: Essays, Performance Tasks, The UBE

• Late 1980s–2011: Additions of essay (MEE) and performance (MPT) components; the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE) adopted by most states—centralizes, but sacrifices state-specific law (17:08–18:10).
• UBE has made it easier to transfer scores—mobility for lawyers among states (30:00).

7. Bar Basics Today

• Eligibility & Forms: 56 U.S. jurisdictions set their own standards; usually require an ABA-accredited JD, but several states allow apprenticeship routes (22:31).
• Testing Schedule: February and July; costs range from hundreds to over $1,000 just to take the exam—with hidden fees for things like typing rather than handwriting (23:15).
• Insular Security: “There is no chance you are going to be allowed to bring your own laptop... so hawkish about preventing cheating that they actually provide tampons... because you're not allowed to bring in your own.” (Josh, 24:15)
• Preparation: Most take expensive prep courses (commonly Barbri, $1,800–$6,000). Josh jokes: “The $6,000 one...they actually have somebody take the test for you and even provide the person with a wig that matches your hair.” (26:09)

8. Breakdown of the UBE (Uniform Bar Exam)

• Three parts:
  • MBE Multiple Choice (50%): 200 questions on civil procedure, contracts, torts, constitutional law, criminal law/procedure, evidence, real property (27:13)
  • MEE Essays (30%)
  • MPT Performance Tasks (20%)
• Total test time: 12 hours over two days, plus ethics/professionalism exam (30:41 – Multi-State Professional Responsibility Exam, MPRE).
• Josh: “You pass it, and that’s great, but I have some inside info...I think it’s sort of untoward to flex on people over your bar score.” (28:44–29:39)

9. Pass Rates and Notable Test-Takers

• Pass rates range widely: 66% in CT to nearly 90% in UT (32:14).
• Some states (e.g., NY) much harder; globally, some bar exams are considered among the world’s toughest.
• Many prominent figures failed at least once (Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, JFK Jr., Kim Kardashian) (33:33).
• Limits may apply on retakes. If failed too many times, can appeal or try alternative jurisdictions (33:51).

10. Alternatives & "Diploma Privilege"

• Wisconsin: Bar not required for graduates of state law schools (51:43).
• NH, VT, VA, CA, OR, and others offer varying degrees of legal apprenticeship as a path to licensure (52:28).
• Chuck: “That’s a pretty cool thing. I think you have to graduate from one of the state’s two law schools there. And they call it diploma privilege.” (51:48)

11. Critiques of the Bar Exam

• Access & Diversity: Black and Hispanic Americans underrepresented; systemic disparities persist (40:01–41:00).
  • Josh: “White law school graduates passed on their first try...24% higher than black students, 13% higher than Hispanic students, and 15% higher than Native Americans.” (41:02)
  • Chuck: “It's just sort of all in the big soup of privilege, you know.” (42:46)
• Validity: No clear, consistently applied definition of "lawyer competence." Exam is minimally predictive of real-world success (study: <4% correlation) (44:41–46:07).
  • Josh: “If you don't have a definition of competence, how can you...test people for whether they meet that definition or not?” (45:46)
• Memorization over Practical Skills: Focus on memorizing doctrine, rather than applied lawyering or research (51:03).
• Scandals & Modern Debacles:
  • COVID: Remote-testing woes—proctors so strict, some urinated themselves; facial recognition didn't register dark-skinned test takers (46:55).
  • California’s exam: Typos, unrevised questions written by ChatGPT; crashes leading to lost essays (47:21–48:37).
  • NY: During one exam, someone suffered cardiac arrest—test-takers told to continue (49:13).

12. Does the Bar Predict Legal Ability?

• Experienced Oklahoma attorneys (no prep) universally failed when retaking the bar—those most seasoned performed worst (49:56).
• Practical skills and specialization learned on the job, not assessed by the bar.

13. Proposed & Future Reforms

• "NextGen Bar Exam" promises to be shorter, possibly more remote-accessible, and less reliant on topics like family law (53:57).
• Movement toward more apprenticeship-based and practical-skills-oriented licensing (Oregon, Washington, et al., considering change) (53:30).

14. A Lawyer’s Take

• Chuck’s anonymous friend:
  • “It shows how you can collect and synthesize a lot of information under time pressure. But...as far as being an indicator of how you'll be as a practitioner? Yeah, not so much...You learn by watching, listening to more experienced attorneys...No pun intended, trial and error.” (55:34–56:20)
  • Supports greater emphasis on legal writing and apprenticeship-based learning.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Josh, on the insularity of legal credentialing:
  “It just seems so fraught with basically opinion because it’s not like the judge is learning about this for the first time. They’re coming at it from fresh eyes. This is like part of their fabric...I just find it fascinating.” (16:30)

• On the test’s logistics:
  “You get hand cramps like the old lawyers used to." (23:49, Josh)

• On privilege and financial investment:
  “Almost assuredly, you have paid several thousand dollars, maybe as much as $6,000 to take preparatory courses...It's just all in the big soup of privilege." (24:41, Chuck; 42:46, Chuck)

• On cheating prevention:
  "They actually provide tampons to people who need them because you’re not allowed to bring in your own tampon." (Josh, 24:15)

• On the future:
  “If you do away with the bar exam, legal fees would probably come down...because one of the functions of gatekeeping that the bar exam does is it artificially keeps the supply of lawyers low.” (54:30)

• On the exam’s predictive value:
  “It was minimally predictive of career success and negligibly related...the Nevada performance test was negligibly related to success?” (Chuck, 44:41)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [03:08] – Listener Rowan’s prompt; why the topic matters
• [04:03–04:24] – Origin of the word “bar”
• [07:04–08:59] – History of the bar exam and Abraham Lincoln’s anecdote
• [13:29–14:21] – Systemic exclusion of Black lawyers; lawsuits
• [18:10] – Modern structure: UBE, portability, state-specific requirements
• [23:15–24:33] – Logistics, preparation, and unique security measures
• [27:12] – Breakdown of UBE components
• [32:14] – Pass rates by state
• [40:01–44:41] – Racial disparities, validity, and impact studies
• [46:55–48:37] – Recent scandals: COVID, ChatGPT mishaps, testing disasters
• [49:56] – Study: Experienced lawyers universally fail the bar second time around
• [51:43–52:28] – Alternatives: 'Diploma privilege' and apprenticeships
• [53:57–56:20] – NextGen Bar Exam, reform efforts, legal writing, and apprenticeships

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Final Takeaways

• The bar exam’s roots are tangled with tradition, systemic exclusion, and evolving standards of legal competence—not always in step with real-world lawyering.
• Its current form is costly, mentally and physically taxing, with debatable predictive value for one’s success as a practicing attorney.
• Alternatives and reforms are gaining traction: practical apprenticeships, diploma privileges, and (potentially) a measured move away from memorization-based testing.
• As always, Josh and Chuck bring levity and clarity to a heavy—and highly consequential—process.

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For more on the subject, check out the episode’s references, or just dive into the world of legal dramas (with a far lower prep fee).

Transcript

[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartradio.

[Josh Clark]

Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And Jerry's here too. And this is one of those good old fashioned Rootin tootin rooty fruity episodes of Stuff you should know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Rooty tooty fresh and fruity.

[Josh Clark]

That's right. I forgot the rest of it. But yes, you knew what I was laying down.

[Chuck Bryant]

Can I shock you right off the bat?

[Josh Clark]

Yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't think I have ever been in an IHOP restaurant in Eaton.

I don't think so.

[Josh Clark]

See, this is normally where I'd be like, what? Yeah, but I don't think you're missing enough to warrant a what?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, if it was always Waffle House, if we were going to do something like that.

[Josh Clark]

Mm.

[Chuck Bryant]

So yeah, never been in an ihop.

[Josh Clark]

The two are actually not really that comparable, to tell you the truth. I mean, if you went to a Waffle House and then went to an ihop, you wouldn't be like, been to one, been to the other. Their menus are different enough, the vibe's different enough.

[Chuck Bryant]

Is IHOP more relatable to like a Denny's?

[Josh Clark]

Yes Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

I've been to Denny's, but not much.

[Josh Clark]

Then you don't need to go to ihop.

[Chuck Bryant]

Can we thank the listener who suggested this episode?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I remember their email, but I don't remember their name.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Cause I finally actually wrote it down, and we're not doing it weeks later. But this came from listener Rowan. And I'm not sure how to pronounce this last name, but I'm gonna go with Garendesi.

[Josh Clark]

That's a great name.

[Chuck Bryant]

Garen. Daisy.

[Josh Clark]

I like Garandaisy more because of the Daisy part.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. But Rowan wrote in, and I was like, you know what? I think someone in Rowan's life had taken the bar, and I think they realized that they didn't know much about it. And I was like, you know, I've never really thought much about the bar exam, and I don't know anything about it.

[Josh Clark]

Well, didn't they also send, like, a little clip or an anecdote about how crazy it gets during the test? Like how nuts people will. Or what nutso links they'll go to to finish?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, yeah, I think I do remember that, actually.

[Josh Clark]

Well, save it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Save it.

[Josh Clark]

Let's talk about the bar exam, Chuck. For those people who aren't aware, and from what I can understand, essentially every country in that has lawyers, has a bar exam, but it's the test that you have to take in most places to become a practicing attorney, to become licensed as an attorney. And that's it. There's bar exam, everybody, goodbye.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, exactly. And you know, the word bar is there because I think it's named after the literal bar railing in a courtroom that divides the public from, you know, the. The business end.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Where they. Yeah. Where you're not really supposed to go past, or else the bailiff will jump on you.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, exactly.

[Josh Clark]

I remember there was a local news story once about a judge who'd been drinking, like, during work, and, like, they followed him, like, on his lunch hour and followed him into, like, a place where he was drinking. They were, like, teeing up the story, and they said this judge not only passed the bar, he went in and drank at it. And that. I mean, like, I saw that 15 years ago, and it stuck with me ever since.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's so lazy.

[Josh Clark]

It is, but, I mean, I thought it was pretty good, to tell you the truth.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Well, that's like when. In the old days when we were writers for housetofworks.com and, like, a shining week is when I wrote a clever.

What do you call the thing under the picture.

[Josh Clark]

Caption.

[Chuck Bryant]

Caption. Now I can't even remember caption with the word caption.

[Josh Clark]

That's how funny. Do you remember any good ones?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, no. But I was like, hey, Emily, check this out. I wrote a clever caption. It was my first professional writing job, so I was, you know, showing pride.

[Josh Clark]

No, I remember that we used to tell one another our great, clever captions.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Look at this one. Music lyrics we'd fit into articles that we just thought we were so sly about.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And now we just say dumb things with our mouths.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Well, I feel like we've shaken off all of the curious lawyers who don't normally listen to us. So we can get started, everybody. One of the things about the bar exam I never understood, and I would guess also that most people out there who aren't attorneys or aspiring attorneys wouldn't really get. But there's a lot of criticism about the bar exam. It's just not. It's not just some test that lawyers have to take to get licensed, which is, on its face, sounds great. Because, like, with any professional licensing that protects the public from incompetent lawyers, they have to show that they understand a minimum standard of how to practice law that will prevent them from being such a dipstick that their clients are going to get electrocuted because they represented them so poorly. It's way, way more intricate than that. Yeah. Socially speaking. Culturally speaking. Socio. Culturally speaking.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Because you don't want to end up with the Lionel Hutz. Right?

[Josh Clark]

No. He almost certainly did not pass the bar.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, we'll get to it. But you don't necessarily have to pass the bar in every state in the United States to practice law. But sit on it, everybody, because that's coming.

I guess we should go back in time and talk about a little bit of the history, because if you go back to colonial days, pre states in the United States or not in the United States, but you know what? Will one day be the United States. And they were.

[Josh Clark]

Goodbye, rest of the curious lawyers.

[Chuck Bryant]

Exactly. There were no bar exams because there were no law schools. If you wanted to work as a lawyer, you would apprentice or clerk for a practicing lawyer for, you know, sometimes you would just do it and donate your time to working for them. Sometimes you would do that and actually pay them.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Which, you know, it seems like a pretty good system. And we'll talk more about apprenticing later, because for my money, I think that's a pretty good way to do things.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

But by 1750, which is pretty early on, all of the colonies.

Got on board, basically, and said, all right, we need. We need standards for people to do this job, and we need to kind of all agree on what that's going to be.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And, like, a lot of stuff, or most things with American law, they were following in the tradition of England, which had had some sort of exam or another for people to become attorneys as far back as the 16th century. But America wasn't that far behind, you know, a couple hundred years, apparently. The first one was Delaware in 1783, and it was essentially just you would go and hang out with a judge, and they would quiz you on some legal stuff. Yeah. And if you got it right, you were. You were accepted to the bar. You were an attorney. From that point on, it was okay for you to practice. It was also supposedly looked on as very easy, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I imagine a lot of that depended on the judge that you got and, like, maybe how much they liked you. In those early days, it was really sort of the wild, wild west right there. Libya helped us with this, and she dug up a pretty fun story about Abraham Lincoln, who was a bar examiner for the state of Illinois in the 1850s and was apparently just, like, at a hotel, chatting with a lawyer in a room, and the lawyer answered a few questions, and Lincoln was like, congratulations, you're an attorney.

[Josh Clark]

So great, man. Yeah. Yeah, I love that story, too. I mean, I can just see Lincoln busting it out so casually.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I think the takeaway is the guy didn't even know the test had begun, essentially.

[Josh Clark]

No, he had no idea.

[Chuck Bryant]

Exactly.

[Josh Clark]

I'm glad you added that part.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

So the actual first written bar exam, kind of like they are today, that popped up around 1855, I think, in Massachusetts, and then it became a requirement about 20 years later in Suffolk county, where Boston was. And by 1920, written exams were, like, the. The way to go. And because now it wasn't just getting quizzed with the judge, law schools started popping up and developing to kind of train you to prepare for that written exam, at the very least. And they actually became an alternative to apprenticing, which, as you'll see later on, is kind of inverted these days. But that was something you could do if, like, say, all of the lawyers in your town were jerks.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

You could go to a law school instead of apprenticing. When you graduated law school, then you could take your bar exam. Those were your two ways, your two paths to the bar exam back then.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. By 1921, the American Bar association was around, and they said, you Know, we really prefer a written exam to license. I don't think they mandated it at that point, but the states generally kind of fell in line behind the ABA. And I think by 1931, another decade later, the American association of Law Schools got together with a committee and they said, all right, we need to develop a real system here. So they came together with the National Conference of Bar Examiners. And at that time, 1930s, they were really like the testing that they were concerned about was what they called black letter law. Just sort of really unambiguous black and white, yes or no answers to things on like, you know, how things are literally legally defined and not a lot of like, you know, hypotheticals being bandied about. Which you're gonna get. Yeah, exactly. Which you're gonna get more these days in the bar examination.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, but one of the problems with taking a test like that is that your hand can get cramped. They didn't want prospective lawyers hands cramping. So in 1972, the National Conference of Bar Examiners came up with the multi state bar examination.

And that created a multiple choice test. Yeah, it also really kind of dug into like your knowledge, but at the same time you can also say like, this is where it became a little more standardized and less loosey goosey. But in that sense it also became a little more scientific minded by creating a test that you could say, this is right, this is wrong. And it wasn't just legal terms. They were applying it to hypothetical situations. But it was still multiple choice, so you could grade it much more easily.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I don't know how I feel about multiple choice. In a test like this. Anytime you can sort of guess, right. I don't think you can necessarily guess your way to success, but I don't.

[Josh Clark]

Know, I think you just came up with a T shirt.

[Chuck Bryant]

Guess your way to success.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, totally.

[Chuck Bryant]

And then on the back, just a ABCD and just a check mark next.

[Josh Clark]

To the C. All of the above.

[Chuck Bryant]

All of the above. Go ahead.

[Josh Clark]

You go ahead.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, well, as this is sort of developing over the decades, I think we're at the 70s here, but it kind of became clear during this period that like, hey, what we've got here is a gatekeeping service. Essentially. Ostensibly the reason was, like you said, is like, we want to keep only like, you know, really knowledgeable people that know what they're doing in these jobs to protect people that hire them for lots and lots of money. But as this was happening, it became even more clear that there was a side effect of that which was you know, immigrants, black people, other people of color that were vying to become attorneys were having a harder time. And this is evidence really early on in 1912, they accidentally admitted three black attorneys into the ABA because they didn't have, you know, like, check here for race. And then they were like, oh goodness, we accidentally let in three black attorneys. So we need to start screening basically for race.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. They said, we need to add a check here for race thing on the application to take the bar exam. And that's essentially what they did. So from 1912 all the way to 1943, if you checked African American or God knows what they had down for you to check back then, you were just not allowed to take the bar exam. Sorry. Yeah, like this is. It was an actual, like you said, a gatekeeping mechanism to prevent black people from becoming lawyers in the United States. And so in 1925, prospective black lawyers said nuts to that. And they got together with actual black lawyers and they came up with the National Bar association, which is still around today as an alternative for black attorneys to basically become attorneys rather than have to go through the aba.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And, you know, since then, especially in like the 1970s, there, there seemed to be like a series of lawsuits from black lawyers in different states that were suing over various what they felt were, you know, discriminatory policies within the test.

I don't think many of those were successful though, were they?

[Josh Clark]

No, the one that sticks out the most, that I've heard the most described as like, well, just basically a good example of the lawsuits that came around at this time was Tyler versus Vickery.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Or Tyler v. Vickery, if you're a lawyer.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

It was a class action suit that alleged that Georgia's bar examinations cut score, which is the minimum score you have to have to pass, had been adjusted with the introduction of the multi state bar exam. Remember the multiple choice test that they introduced, that it had basically been introduced and designed to continue to keep black people from passing the bar exam. And the fifth Circuit Court of Georgia said, we don't really think that's true for some reason. They said, we don't see any intent to discriminate, which is neither here nor there under Title VII of the Civil Rights act, which prevents employment discrimination.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

But they also said, here's the thing. The bar. The American Bar association is not an employer. They're not a labor organization, they're not an employment agency. So therefore Title VII doesn't really apply to them. And the court said, ABA continue to discriminate through the bar exam as you see fit. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know much about lawyer stuff in my head.

[Josh Clark]

I don't know spit about lawyering in my.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, spit in my civilian mind. I see that as kind of a punt, legally speaking. And maybe that was, maybe that's, you know, a lot of times you decide something on precedent and whether or not you feel it's right or not, that's just the precedent. But I don't know, that felt like a punt to me by saying like, well, they're not an employer in an agency or labor organization, so we're just sort of not going to hear this one.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And this reveals to me something that I just find fascinating is when lawyers sue, other lawyers or bodies of lawyers or judges rule on the test that it takes to create lawyers and therefore judges. It just seems so fraught with basically opinion because they're so like, it's not like the judge is learning about this for the first time. They're coming at it from fresh eyes. Like this is like part of their fabric is having been a law student and becoming a lawyer and then becoming a judge. You know, I just find it fascinating.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, totally. Should we wrap up sort of the testing stuff and then take a break?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, let's get back into the evolution of the test again.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So now we're in the late 80s, 1988, I'm a junior in high school, still seeking that first kiss. And the NCBE has added the Multi State Essay Examination at this point. So now you're back to essaying, which is how it previously had been until that multiple choice test. And in 97 it handed over the Multi State Performance Test or the mpt, which says, hey, let's sort of do like, do some practice stuff like write up a brief for me or write out a memo, draft a memo. Let's see how you do on that. And then finally, in 2011, the uniform bar exam or the UBE was adopted by most states where all three of those tests kind of make that one up as one big test.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Which is, you know, if you're a state and you don't feel like going to the trouble of coming up with your entire, your own bar exam, now you can just use the ube.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And it's, it's proven like, it's, it's, there's all sorts of great questions in there. You sacrificed state law, but a lot of people say like, well, like law students don't need to sit around and memorize state law. That's a waste of time in favor of the ube, which is pretty rich because a lot of people argue that the UBE itself is a waste time because you have to memorize general law rather than state law, which we'll talk more about that. I just, I'm chomping at the bit right now.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, but it did make it like more easy to transfer from state to state and stuff like that. And we'll get into those specifics too. But let's take that break, okay. And we'll get into the basics of the bar right after this.

[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

That's right. And you can get your content discovered fast with integrated SEO tools. Every Squarespace website is optimized to be indexed with meta descriptions, an auto generated sitemap, and more. So you show up more often to more people in global search engine results.

[Chuck Bryant]

Just go to squarespace.com stuff and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use our offer code stuff to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain.

Hey Mrs. Sarah, look I'm standing out front of AM PM right now and well, you're sweet and all, but I.

[Josh Clark]

Found something more fulfilling, even kind of cheesy.

[Chuck Bryant]

But I like it.

[Josh Clark]

Sure, you met some of my dietary needs, but they've just got it all. So farewell. Oatmeal. So long, you strange soggy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Break up with bland breakfast and taste AM PM's bacon, egg and cheese biscuit made with cage free eggs, smoked bacon and melty cheese on a buttery biscuit. AM PM Too much. Good stuff.

[Josh Clark]

So Chuck, it turns out there's 56 jurisdictions in the United States. Who knew? I didn't. 50, 50 states plus some territories you got, some overseas possessions, you got, you know what else?

So there's 56 and each jurisdiction is, has its own like highest agency that basically says these are the standards to become a lawyer in the state. And again, a lot of them just said you have to pass the uniform bar exam. That's the standard. But they also can kind of mess with it here or there. And it's up to this, this agency that's associated with the highest court in the state, usually the state supreme court.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, exactly. In most jurisdictions, if you just to take the bar exam, you have to have graduated from an accredited law school from the American Bar association, which usually means a three year program. Some states though are like, hey, if you're not, if you didn't go to an accredited school, that's fine. We'll still let you take the bar. If you are in Washington State, Virginia, Vermont or California, they allow a legal apprenticeship to swap out law school, which I think is super kind of cool. Yeah. And Maine and New York let you sub out like a year or two of that law school for an apprenticeship.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, for sure. Which is pretty neat. It's old school. It's a throwback kind of thing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

If you want to take the bar exam, most of the time it's given in February and July. Those are your two options. And then you're going to pay some money for it. And there's a lot of ways you're going to pay money for it just to register to take it. The bar exam itself, it can be a few hundred dollars, it can be more than $1,000 depending on your state and how greedy they are.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

If you want to use a laptop, you want to type out your briefs and your memos and your essays rather than write them out because you get hand cramps like the old lawyers used to.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

You're going to have to pay a fee for that. And the reason why is because there is no chance you are going to be allowed to bring your own laptop because they keep the. The. The place so tight and are so hawkish about preventing cheating that they actually provide tampons to people who need them because you're not allowed to bring in your own tampon.

[Chuck Bryant]

Wow. Really?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's happened. And apparently it's not just an isolated thing that they have a bowl of tampons.

[Chuck Bryant]

Wow.

[Josh Clark]

You grab one if you need it, and you hope that they don't run out if you really need it. So, yeah, it's. It's. It's like there's no way you're bringing your own laptop in.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Or tampon.

[Josh Clark]

Exactly.

[Chuck Bryant]

So. Wow. I never knew that. That's a nice little tidbit.

[Josh Clark]

Thanks. I thought that was pretty great, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

So you have to have money to register. Like you said, you have to have money to. You know, a lot of times people take off work for several months, so you have to have a life that can do that, you know, which indicates a certain amount of at least either privilege or maybe hard work in saving, if that's how you did it, which is great. And then almost assuredly, you have paid several thousand dollars, maybe as much as $6,000 to take preparatory courses. About 60% of the market share in the United States is a company called Barbri. Barbri can be up to 6000, maybe as low as 1800 bucks. And they have been around since the 1950s. And I was. I was like, what does Barbri stand for? And I had a weirdly hard time finding out what it stood for until I, sadly, Wikipedia just turned it up. I should have gone to the most obvious place, but I think when they merged in 2021. Or. No, no, no. They merged in the 70s, I think, and it was just the names of two companies. I think Bay Area Review was Bar, and the Bar Review, Inc. Was Bri. And so they just squashed those together. So kind of boring story.

[Josh Clark]

I had seen that it was a merger of Barbizon Modeling School and Brie, meaning the makers of Brie cheese around the world.

[Chuck Bryant]

Wow. That's a mashup I could enjoy.

[Josh Clark]

Right? And the $6,000 one that you can pay for, like the premium test prep, they actually have somebody take the test for you, and they even provide the person with a wig that matches your hair so it looks a lot like you too.

[Chuck Bryant]

I did see, though, they have a guarantee if you do not. If you pay that money to them and you don't pass the Bar.

I think you get to take the course again for free. One more time if you're taking the exam again.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, that's not fair.

[Chuck Bryant]

So you don't get your money back, but you get to retake the course at no charge?

[Josh Clark]

No, Barbizon. Modeling has long had a motto. You don't get your money back. Right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, exactly.

[Josh Clark]

So let's break down the ube. The Uniform Bar Examination. Which is the culmination of decades of the National Conference of Bar Examiners. Hard work, sweat, blood, tears, joy, pain. Yeah, and again, it's. You can break it down into three parts that kind of came along separately. The first, remember, was that multiple choice test, the multi State Bar examination.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

There's 200 multiple choice questions. I've seen 175. I guess it depends on, I don't know, your jurisdiction and how much. How valuable they find. 25 questions.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, maybe.

[Josh Clark]

But it covers seven different areas of the law. You want to take them?

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure. Simple procedure. Contracts, of course. Nice torts, Constitutional law, criminal law, the sexiest law.

[Josh Clark]

Careful.

[Chuck Bryant]

Criminal law and procedure. That is evidence, which is its own category. And real property.

[Josh Clark]

Ka ching.

[Chuck Bryant]

And that is 50% of the UBE score. Then the other two are the multi state essay once again, which is 30%. And then the two multi state performance test tasks. And that is 20%.

[Josh Clark]

Yep. So you're like, okay, I could take that, no problem. Sure, you might be able to take it. You probably wouldn't pass. And you'd give up 12 hours plus of your life. 12 hours just of the test. It's spread out over three days. Technically, but the UBE takes up two of those days. 12 hours divided by two days divided by four sessions. So three in the morning, three in the afternoon, go to your hotel room, can't sleep, toss and turn, come back the next morning. Three in the morning, three in the afternoon.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Oh, well, we should mention too. That's another reason you might be paying some extra money if you don't live near a testing site. Like travel and room and board and all that stuff.

[Josh Clark]

Good point.

[Chuck Bryant]

And scotch at the end of the day. Of course.

[Josh Clark]

That's right.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's graded on a 400 point scale. Depends on the state on what they consider passing. Generally 260 to 270. I said state. Of course. Jurisdiction. And then apparently it's not like acing the bar gets you anything more than passing the bar, you pass it. And that's great. But I have some inside info from attorney friends which I'll kind of dabble in here and there. But I think it's sort of untoward to. You don't go in and be like, oh, ace the bar.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I saw a Reddit post where somebody posted like, I got a score of 330. And I mean, is that high? I don't mean to make anybody who's got lower than that feel bad, but I'm just curious, like, what do you guys think? And it was like you discussed us like, that is just sad. So, yeah, it's not really cool to flex on people over your bar score and you pass.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's all that matters.

[Josh Clark]

That's right. And then if you do pass, there's always a gaggle of attorneys, usually quite experienced, seasoned attorneys, who just are waiting for you to finish. And when you finish, they embrace you and that's how you know that you've passed the bar exam.

[Chuck Bryant]

We did mention that. Those UBE scores are portable. You can. It's not like the old days when you had to pass that state's bar. You know, I think that's how it used to be, kind of across the board.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

They're transferable for two to five years after taking the exam. It depends on the jurisdiction, of course. And then if you're in a jurisdiction that doesn't utilize that UBE test, most of them still have the MBE as a big part of their exam, usually with their own specific, like state law stuff if they do that. And there's usually also a third day, which you were talking about earlier, that third test, which is like a 60 question ethics test.

[Josh Clark]

Right. It's called the Multi State Professional Responsibility Examination, the mpre. And they ask you questions. It's scored separately, but they have questions like, you know, attorney Lionel Hutz brought in a bag of pot to one of his clients into prison. Is attorney Hutz guilty of Loving too much? Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Was that a real Simpsons thing?

[Josh Clark]

No.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, okay. Because I could see that they only.

[Josh Clark]

Really talked about pot, like on a couple of really great episodes. But, you know.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, that wasn't their bag. Normally.

[Josh Clark]

That wasn't their bag of pot.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah. That wasn't their sack.

[Josh Clark]

Don't use that word.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, sack's kind of gross, isn't it?

[Josh Clark]

Moist.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, boy.

What was the other one?

[Josh Clark]

Moist Sack.

Or pussy? Go look that up in the transcript.

[Chuck Bryant]

Don't do it. Let's talk about pass rates, because it really obviously depends on the state. They can vary pretty wildly, actually, from looking at some of these stats, I think for first timers from July of this year's testing of 2025 first timer pass rates, there was a range, like from 66% in Connecticut to almost 90% in Utah. So go Utah. If you look at overall rates, not necessarily just first timers, 2025, only 54% in the state of Alabama, once again, compared to 86 in Utah. So I don't know what's in the water out there in Utah, but those attorneys are sipping it up.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, it's widely considered a really easy state to pass the bar.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, is it really?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, interesting. Okay.

[Josh Clark]

Some very hard places to take the bar around the world, actually, that I saw. Nigeria, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Ontario, Canada. Canada.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

New York State, all like, New York State's bar exam is so difficult. It's like as hard as the entire nations of Singapore's. So there are. It definitely varies by jurisdiction and by country just how hard it can be.

[Chuck Bryant]

Wow, that's interesting. I do know that of the 2022 graduates, this is just another sort of stat for you. Over 90% of graduates from accredited schools pass within a couple of years. But from what I see, there's really no shame for it to take a crack or two to pass the bar. I don't think. I don't know if it's something you're gonna like, run around the office telling people on your first day, but I don't think it's like a mark of shame. There have been plenty of very successful attorneys, very famous attorneys that didn't pass the bar on the first go, including Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton and all the Dems, I think. JFK. Yeah, a bunch of dims. JFK Jr. I think took two or three times to pass.

[Josh Clark]

I saw that.

[Chuck Bryant]

And old Kim Kardashian took a time or two.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I think three.

[Chuck Bryant]

Three.

[Josh Clark]

And there's actually limits on how many times you can take it, depending on your state, your jurisdiction, your territory.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, well, they just say, sorry, it sounds like you should try another line of work.

[Josh Clark]

There are some places that say that. I don't know if they actually say that. The gaggle of attorneys tells you that when you fail the sixth time. But there are other places that have discretionary rules where after you reach a certain number, like, say, I think six is the highest I've seen, you can apply to take it again. You can basically go to the state bar and be like, please, I want to be a lawyer so bad. I'm just really terrible at this.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, it is a test, and some people aren't great test takers. We'll kind of Talk about that in a little bit. But also, I imagine there's plenty of things you can do with the law degree if you haven't passed the bar, right?

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

I mean, it's great. Like you see somebody referred to like, oh, this is a lawyer or something, but they have, like they're in some field that has nothing to do with law. Yeah, you're just like, they very frequently are advisors. Like, just they know how far you can bend the law.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

There's a lot of stuff you can do with it. All right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. You can always teach, I imagine.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah, that too. I have a little cute little addition addendum to this part.

[Chuck Bryant]

Let's go.

[Josh Clark]

The youngest person ever to pass the bar is Sophia Park. She passed the bar in 2024 at age 17. 17 years, 8 months.

[Chuck Bryant]

And was that after law school even?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, she started law school at 13.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, she's one of those.

[Josh Clark]

So she beat the previous record by three months. The previous record had been set at age, I guess, 18 years and one month by her brother Peter. Man, isn't that nuts?

[Chuck Bryant]

It's a smart family.

[Josh Clark]

It is. They really wanted to be lawyers.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Or, you know, are they practicing law or are they just like. I just wanted to show off.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, I believe they're both practicing law.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I guess so.

[Josh Clark]

Well, should we take another break, Chuck? I guess we should.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, one more little tidbit here at the end. You know, we said that a bar exam is basically to say, hey, you can practice law. The one other thing that it does is it helps determine what schools can teach it. Because the ABA requires that law schools, if you want to be in an accredited law school, a certain percentage of your graduates have to pass the bar within two years, otherwise your accreditation goes away.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I saw. 75% of your graduates have to pass.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right. Or they're like, sorry, I guess you're not teaching well enough.

[Josh Clark]

Exactly. I wanted my tidbit to be last, so I'm just going to repeat it now. Okay.

On second thought, we'll just go to break. How about that?

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, we'll be right back.

Support for the show Today comes from public.com. you're thoughtful about where your money goes. You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side. The point is, you're engaged with your investments and Public gets that.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can put together a multi asset portfolio for the long haul. Stocks Bonds, options, crypto it's all there plus an industry leading 3.6% APY high yield cash account.

[Chuck Bryant]

Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously. Go to public.comsysk and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.comsysk paid for by Public Investing. All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal. Brokerage services for U.S. listed registered securities options and bonds in a self directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC. Crypto trading provided by ZeroHash Complete disclosures [e-mail] Disclosures.

[Josh Clark]

Hey everybody. We're hitting the road again starting in January 2026, picking up again in April 2026 and eventually Canada will tell you year dates too.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. We're gonna do at least three legs. And the first leg is starting out in Denver, Colorado at the Paramount Theater on January 27th. We're gonna go back to our beloved Seattle at the Paramount Theater there on the 28th and then finally back at SketchFest on the 29th at the Sidney Goldstein Theater.

[Josh Clark]

Yep. And then April 16th, 17th and 18th, we're going to be in Madison, Wisconsin, Chicago, Illinois and Akron, Ohio. And if you're not keeping up with all this or taking notes, don't worry, you can get all the info you need and buy tickets@stuffyou should know.com click on the tour button and thank us later.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. We can't wait to see everybody again out there on the road.

Run a business and not thinking about radio. Think again. Cause more people are listening to the radio and iHeart today than they were 20 years ago. And only iHeart broadcast radio connects with more Americans than TV, digital, social, any other media, even twice as many teens than TikTok. And that reach means everything. Just think about the universal marketing formula.

[Josh Clark]

The number of consumers who hear your.

[Chuck Bryant]

Message times the response rate equals the results. Now let's get those results growing for your business. Radio's here now more than ever, and iheart's leading the way. Think radio can help your business. Think iheart streaming, podcasting and radio where the reach is real. Let us show [e-mail] that's iheartadvertising.com or call 844-844-Iheart one more time. Just call 844-844-iheart and get radio working for you.

All right, so we're back with more critiques and problems on the bar because if you start to do a little digging it turns out there's been a lot of, a lot of that over the years for a lot of different reasons. We've mentioned some of this stuff while it was developing, basically.

Banning people of color from even taking the test for a long time. But black and Hispanic Americans are still very underrepresented in the field of law. And that's a problem because when you're a practicing attorney, like a lot of.

Opinion, that's why they call them opinions, and judgment goes into it. And sure it's based on precedent, but your perspective is important and having diverse perspectives is also important, right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, for sure. It's a white male profession, essentially, statistically speaking, that is far and away the largest population represented in the legal profession in the United States. And there's statistics and figures that kind of show the disparity here. There's Some data from 2021 from the American Bar association that showed that white law school graduates passed on their first try at the bar exam at a rate 24% higher than black students, 13% higher than Hispanic students, and 15% higher than Native Americans. So those are really substantial disparities in passing the bar the first time. And so being in the hot seat, the National Conference of Bar Examiners is like, hey, hey, hey, everybody mellow out here. This is a, this is, this tracks with other scoring of racial disparities like, like law school grades, LSAT grades. Like this is in line with them. Just leave the bar exam alone. And by the way, their interpretation is that this is an example of long standing systemic racial disparities in the American education system that start way back long before the, the somebody gets to law school and goes to take the bar, and that the bar exam is just showing this, it's just reflecting this problem elsewhere. So again, stop looking at the bar is essentially what the NCBE says.

[Chuck Bryant]

It also kind of sounds like we're just a part of the grand history of systemic discrimination throughout our country.

[Josh Clark]

Well, that's a critique of them too. People are like, that's your answer. Like we're just perpetuating an already existing racial disparity. That's essentially what they're saying in that argument.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it's definitely a strange argument. Other people say that.

Just part of that disparity is, you know, the cost associated with law school and to be a successful candidate and like we said, the privilege that it takes to maybe be able to pay for that and then take off months work and pay for the very best preparatory courses. You know, that's, it's just sort of all in the big soup of privilege, you know.

[Josh Clark]

Right. I saw that black and Hispanic students who take the bar exam are 50% likelier to work during their bar prep period.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Than a white student. Like, it's just logistically speaking, racially speaking, it's just much likelier that a white test taker is going to be able to not work and just dedicate their time to prepping for the bar. And I mean, that alone explains a lot of it, because the bar exam is essentially.

Like. It's a standardized test that. Where you memorize, essentially year one law school stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean, that's one of the other critiques, is that.

You know, it's a memorization test. And.

There have been plenty of studies that show that it doesn't necessarily isn't a marker toward your future performance as an attorney or like, how successful you may be. There was a study in 2024 from Nevada that compared scores on the NBA, MBE and other components of their test of, I think, a little more than 500 new attorneys and how they were basically rated how affected they were by their peers and their supervisors and judges. And they did find a small positive relationship between some of the ratings, some parts of the bar. But at the end of the day, overall, they said it was minimally predictive of career success and negligibly related. The Nevada performance test was negligibly related to success?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Those low correlations were as low as 1 to 4%. I think 4% was the highest as far as the actual whole bar exam relating to these ratings of how effective these lawyers were by their peers. They said, we can only account for that with 12% of the bar exam. The other. The rest of the distinctions or the differences in effectiveness has nothing to do with their score on the bar exam. And so people say, like, well, what the heck is the bar exam doing? And again, the National Conference of Bar Examiners are like, we're testing for lawyer competence to protect the public dummy. And people say, well, how are you testing for legal competence?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Like, what is legal competence? And this is where the National Conference of Board Examiners, like, pull their shirt away from their necks. You can see, like, some sweat breaking out on their forehead because they've never given a definition of competence. And if you don't have a definition of competence, how can you, in a standardized way, test people for whether they meet that definition or not? Yeah. So people say, like, the bar exam under that. That description is by definition invalid. It is not. It's not a valid test, meaning that it doesn't test the thing it purports to test because we just have no idea what it is testing.

[Chuck Bryant]

You know what, you just sounded like what an attorney sounds like. You just dropped the mic in court and then sat down. And I was to your just sat down on your left and I put my hand on your shoulder and was like, hell yeah, man. Got him. There have also been a lot of just sort of disasters in recent years, very public ones in terms of the bar. During COVID they offered remote exams and it was just sort of a joke In a lot of cases, there were a lot of computer problems, like programs crashing. They had facial recognition issues in that sometimes they failed to identify dark skinned test takers. So that's bad. Right off the bat. You also, again, it was remote, so you had to keep your eyes on the screen at all times or they would think you're cheating if you're looking around or looking into your lap or something. So people were like literally urinating themselves in their seat because they couldn't move. And one woman went into labor and went through the test and gave birth and then came home and finished the second day.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. If you want to know how tough Loyola University Law students are, there you go.

[Chuck Bryant]

What about California with the ChatGPT questions?

[Josh Clark]

This one, it's got a lot of schadenfreude around it, but California said, nuts to the ube. We can do a better program ourselves and save money. So they designed their own bar exam, like, just completely eschewed the uni. The uniform bar examination. Right. And it just, the rollout was horrible. There were people who were taking the test. They would get error messages. The program would crash during the test. It wouldn't save their essays. Can you imagine finishing an essay and clicking to save it? And they're like, nope, sorry, do it again.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's every student's nightmare.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And remember, this is time. Like, you have three hours per segment. Right. Like, if you don't finish in time, sorry, like, you, you have to stop. So that's a huge part of it. And then also, like you said, chatgpt, it turned out, was involved because some students were like, there, like, are misspellings and typos in some of these multiple choice questions. And the California State Bar said, wait, what?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, Turns out that some of those questions were CHAT GPT.

Written by Chat GPT. They weren't even reviewed by a lawyer or copy edited by the state agency that oversaw the test because, you know, I don't know, money, I guess.

[Josh Clark]

And this was another case of lawyers suing lawyers and lawyers suing their state bar and all that. And it, like, California has just lost so much money on it. Remember, this is a money saving thing, too, so. Right. Again, there's like, a little bit of schadenfreude, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And there was one incident in New York where someone went into cardiac arrest while taking the test. That was this year in the July test. And people are like, we should help here. Right. And the test proctors were like, nope, everyone be quiet and.

Just keep taking your test and we'll deal with this in the next lunch break.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Like, they had to keep taking their tests while the paramedics were saving this person's life. Like, next to them, essentially, that was what they were forced to do. That's how.

I don't know. You choose your word. They are about assigning these tests or carrying out these tests.

[Chuck Bryant]

I was working a TV commercial one time as a PA years ago, out in the desert and in California, and a crew member had a cardiac arrest, and the director told them to move a big fake rock in front of. I mean, they were tending to the guy, but they were like, we need to keep shooting. Like, go move that big fake rock in front of the paramedics so we can keep shooting.

[Josh Clark]

I guess it's better than the director being like, take that fake rock and finish him off with it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And then drag him out of the way.

[Chuck Bryant]

One thing I wondered, because I always kind of wonder, like, how would we do if we took the SAT now? Like, you know, at this stage in life or something. I wondered about, like, a really experienced attorney years later, if they took the bar again. And Livia dug into that and found a study from 2021, 16 successful, experienced practicing attorneys from Oklahoma retook the bar, essentially with no prep. It was just like their prep was their career. On the theory that, hey, if it's measuring ability, then this should bear out in the grades. And none of them passed. They got scores ranging from 26 to 52%, so nobody would have passed that bar. And the lawyers who've been practicing longest did the worst out of all of them.

[Josh Clark]

And then one general criticism of the bar exam, too, in addition to everything else we've just talked about, is that it doesn't in any real way.

Kind of jibe with what these lawyers are going to do in the legal profession.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

It's general questions about law generally in the United States. Again, it's essentially the stuff you learn in your first year at law school. Because the next two years you start to get into your specialization and it's a lot of memory and memorization and a lot of lawyering. After you graduate and go through the bar and become an attorney is open book research to figure out what law applies exactly. The bar exam is closed book, rapid fire testing. So they're like, this is not like even putting away everything else, all the other arguments. At its base. It's kind of a flawed test to start with.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. And because of that, there are a lot of jurisdictions that have long had workarounds and alternatives and there are changes on the horizon for the bar itself. Wisconsin, it's the only state, I guess, only jurisdiction that never stopped saying, hey, you went to law school and you can practice law in this state. You don't have to take the bar here, which is pretty cool. I think you have to graduate from one of the state's two law schools there. And they call it diploma privilege. I think in the past couple of decades, New Hampshire has followed suit a little bit. And if you graduate with honors from University of New Hampshire Law School and you participate in court simulations and have practical experience, then you could be admitted to practice law without the bar.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And we had said earlier that the, the law school was originally created as an alternative to apprenticeship. Some states have gone the other way now where the apprenticeships are alternatives to law school. Like it's a pass bar. I like it too. Vermont and Virginia, they allow apprenticeships instead of, actually instead of the bar exams themselves. Oregon offers apprenticeships where if you're a law school graduate.

You can become a lawyer without the bar exam. If you apprentice for I think 675 hours over four weeks in supervised work, you will basically become a lawyer after that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Four weeks, four months.

[Josh Clark]

No, four weeks, four years. No, I was joking. There's only 675 hours in four weeks, so.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, okay.

[Josh Clark]

So just you'd be doing 24 hours a day for a month as an apprentice, which seems core.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'll assume your math checks out.

[Josh Clark]

It does. I even used a calculator.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, great. I think Washington state has a plan coming in 2026, so more states are kind of getting on board with this. California last year actually rejected a proposal to become more like Oregon with those apprenticeship hours. Even though the State Bar of California's Board of Trustees said, we think this is a good idea, the state Supreme Court said, no, no, no. But coming around the corner now we have the next gen bar exam, right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. The NCBE is like, everybody settle down. So starting in 2018, they're like, we're going to change this a little bit. The tests are going to be shorter. We're going to make it so it's possible to take it remotely if need be. And then it's. It's just going to be a little different where I think it's a little more essay heavy than the original test. But they're also carving out some stuff that they're not going to test on, like family law and that kind of thing. So it's a little leaner, meaner kind of bar exam that they're coming up with.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right.

[Josh Clark]

Two things that I saw that are worth mentioning real quick. If you do away with the bar exam, there's a couple of benefits to that. One is that it puts the onus on law schools themselves to graduate competent lawyers. Right now, there are some law schools that are considered diploma mills because as long as 75% of your graduates pass the bar within two years, like, you stay accredited, and you can make a lot of money off that other 25%, that's one thing that would happen. Another one is that legal fees would probably come down because one of the functions of gatekeeping that the bar exam does is it artificially keeps the supply of lawyers low, which artificially inflates the fees associated with lawyers, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Aha.

[Josh Clark]

Pretty neat.

[Chuck Bryant]

Think about that.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I spoke to my friend. I think I know a few attorneys here and there, but only like, one good friend who's a lawyer who is electing to remain anonymous in this case.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

But I did text him kind of about all this, and he said, I would say it's only useful in that it shows how you can collect and synthesize a lot of information under time pressure. But that's not really much different than most standardized tests. But as far as being an indicator of how you'll be as a practitioner. Yeah, not so much. He says, for example, the bar will test you to some extent on the rules of civil procedure. But passing the bar doesn't mean you can walk into a deposition the day after you pass and know how to do that. As someone who's taken hundreds of depositions, you learn by watching, listening to more experienced attorneys do it, and then by trial and error, no pun intended, doing it yourself. He is in favor of the apprenticeships. He said it's probably a lot more helpful as long as your mentor knew what they were doing.

And then said one thing he would like to see change is.

I think, more emphasis on writing. He said I see so many briefs written by someone who allegedly passed a bar that are just horrible. He said, that's probably just a criticism of the legal education more than the bar. And then he said he wanted to remain anonymous. And he said, I know it sounds silly or overly cautious when there are SCOTUS justices who can accept luxury vacations with impunity, but I'm supposed to be impartial here, so ragging on the bar might not be a good look.

[Josh Clark]

I think that's smart.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

You got anything else?

[Chuck Bryant]

I got nothing else.

[Josh Clark]

Well, thanks for tapping your anonymous friend. That was good info.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

If you want to learn more about the bar exam, go take the bar exam. And in the meantime, it's time for listener mail.

[Chuck Bryant]

That'd be kind of fun. I mean, if it was free. I would take the bar exam just to, like, with zero knowledge of anything, just to see, like, how poorly I would do.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I would, too. I'd be right next to you, peeing in my seat and going into labor and having a heart attack.

[Chuck Bryant]

Wouldn't that be funny, though, if we got, like, I don't know, even, like, a 20% or something?

[Josh Clark]

Or if we passed and we just automatically became lawyers? Yeah, let's do it. All right.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right. This is about the Salton Sea. You called for listener mail, right? All right. Hey, guys. I was listening to the Salton Sea episode in college. I took an ocean geography class and learned about inland seas. An inland sea, because, remember, we sort of wondered difference between seas and lakes. He said an inland sea can either be entirely landlocked or have a single river connected to the ocean. Inland seas are larger than lakes and inhabit salinity between a lake and an ocean. So I think you've mentioned something about salinity. They're typically remnants of larger oceans and have numerous islands. But of course, the scientific community names these things, and sometimes it can be rather confusing. The Caspian Sea, for example, is classified as a lake, despite being known as the largest inland sea in the world. And the Hudson Bay is an island sea or which is. Did you know that?

[Josh Clark]

An island sea or inland sea.

[Chuck Bryant]

He says island, but probably meant inland.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, I didn't know. I had no idea whether it's an island sea or an inland sea. I had no idea.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or Dylan's favorite sea is the.

Larapentine Sea or the Laurapentine Sea. It's an ancient sea that split Australia in half during the Cambrian explosion. Being a longtime listener and learning about new things is the best part of my commute, guys. That is from Dylan.

[Josh Clark]

Thanks a lot, Dylan. That was great info. I still like your interpretation, Chuck. Which, if I remember correctly, you were saying that an inland a lake would be landlocked.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think, yeah. I mean, it sounds like there's no true definition. I don't know.

[Josh Clark]

Well then let's keep going with yours.

[Chuck Bryant]

Great.

[Josh Clark]

Nice try, Dylan. If you want to be like Dylan and and send us a great email, you can send it off to stuffpodcastheartradio.com.

[Chuck Bryant]

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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