> Bar passage rates at Whittier, long an avenue for disadvantaged students to become lawyers, had plunged in recent years. Its passage rate hovered in the routine statewide range, about 68 percent a few years ago, but fell to 22 percent on the July 2016 bar.
This is a great example of a statistic that is interesting but needs more context to be useful. Did the authors check to see whether other California law schools saw a similar decline? If so, why call out Whittier? If not, wouldn't that suggest that the problem is with Whittier and not with the bar program? What am I supposed to infer, being told only that at least one school saw a decline?
Edit: I looked it up. There apparently aren't reported numbers for Whittier because fewer than 11 of their students sat for the bar exam for the first time in 2017. So the statistic is even less useful than I suspected.
Coming from a lawyer who passed Illinois in 2004 and took California's bar in 2014, I can say that for my CA test, the passage rate for attorneys barred in other states was around 20% (if I recall). California has differences in its laws that make it naturally harder than the "collective norm." Further, part of that low passage rate is because of two factors: 1) most attorneys already barred work full time, thus study time constraints; 2) what you're asked on the bar exam has very little connection to the actual practice of law. Lots of theory and hand-wringing, but neither law school nor the bar exam truly prepare you for HOW to be a lawyer.
Glad I passed both on the first try. Won't ever do it again.
> California has differences in its laws that make it naturally harder than the "collective norm."
To expand on this, as a non-lawyer who pays lawyers, I absolutely refuse to sign anything under California law which doesn't have to be. The courts take three to 4 times longer than Delaware's [1], there are a bunch of BS rules you have to spend ten pages having both parties mutually agree to exculpate from their proceedings and the lawyers, given all this and the difficulty of the exam, are a time and a half as expensive as New York's.
[1] "For fiscal year 2014, the average elapsed from filing to disposition [for the Delaware Supreme Court] was only 154.2 days, and the average elapsed time from submission to disposition was only 27.3 days" [a]. Meanwhile, in California, the median time to process an appeal, statewide, is 518 days, ranging from 423 in Ventura to 693 in Sacramento [b].
Delaware is a good forum to litigate internal corporate affairs because forming and regulating corporate entities is a major industry and revenue driver for that state. The Chancery Court is specialized in an arcane and technical area of the law, which makes Delaware better than other states for this one purpose.
Outside of that niche, I think California has a rather good body of law. For example, it features strong protections for employee and consumer rights that (in my opinion) other states sorely need.
I don't know which "bunch of BS rules" you're referring to specifically, but it's true that California tends to require greater notice when a party is waiving important statutory rights in a written agreement. I doubt that the few bits of bold text or extra signature lines (which are already in every practitioner's standard templates) are what you're really complaining about.
Employment and consumer law tends to frown upon changing the body of law by contract. I'm referring to business formation, contracting, merging, fundraising, et cetera. If you sign under California law for many of these agreements, you will often find at least 3 pages listing out specific sections of California civil procedure and commercial code that both parties will, almost every time, find it beneficial to exempt themselves from. You can't do it in a single, blanket paragraph. You have to write out custom paragraphs for each and every section.
California may have a good body of law, but taking three to 4 times longer to litigate means it costs, cetris paribus, three to 4 times more to defend your contracts. That greatly benefits deep-pocketed litigants (and contract breachers).
Ah, yep. I agree with all of that, except I'm not sure if there's a linear relationship between case lifespan and fees. The delay in California really comes from overburdened courts and distant trial dates. Anecdatally, I haven't found that this encourages lawyers to churn any more work than the case "naturally" supports (i.e., the amount they can get away with billing given the claim size, complexity, insurance pot, fee clauses, etc.).
> given all this and the difficulty of the exam, [CA lawyers] are a time and a half as expensive as New York's.
Former big firm lawyer here. This is definitely not true across the board. In the firm I worked at, we had three "rates": reduced, normal, and New York. The NY rate was only charged by NY lawyers, or by other lawyers working on matters for NY lawyers (typically for NY clients, who would put up with it).
It may be that small-firm lawyers are much less expensive in NY, but I would doubt that this is the case. If you're comparing upstate NY to SF, you'll see a big difference, due to cost of living. But compare upstate NY to Sacramento, and the difference would not be anywhere close to 1.5x.
Comparing New York City to the Bay Area in terms of final bill, not hourly rates. Certainly not true across the board, but when I compared the cost to do the same task (e.g. set up and manage an SPV, or paper a simple merger) between Wilson and Latham, on one hand, and Cravath or Greenberg, on the other hand, I found a consistent 30 to 45% premium for California. A lot of this came from having to list out, section by section, bodies of California's commercial code everyone was agreeing to ignore.
Note that the bills with these same firms reach parity with New York the moment I insist we use Delaware or New York law.
I fail to see why listing out a larger legal document should be 30-45% premium.
That is like saying
"Because I wrote this code in Java instead of Go, it cost about 40% more (I had to generate all the getters and setters, added up to 40% more lines of code)"
Legal documents are the highest level copy and paste from previous legal documents. In the same way many code is glue some libraries together, but worse (i.e. more reuse).
Thanks for clarifying. I don't know anyone who uses Greenberg in the SF area, and I'm shocked that they would be pricier than Cravath. I can believe that Latham NY might be less than Wilson, just because Latham is more commoditized than Wilson in terms of branding.
There may also be swings in "rack rate" because (1) the partner you are talking to at one firm is hungry and therefore will discount; or (2) some firms discount up front but then hold fast, whereas other firms are more receptive to discounting the bill at the end of the day.
Discounts are a huge part of it. That said, I typically try to box legal bills in advance for everything except litigation. For the avoidance of doubt, I give both coasts the same budget. Guess which side's lawyers love running right through it (or approaching it to within 5¢).
Exactly what I thought. A bunch of technical, academic questions that have very little relation to the actual work being done? Yes, I am very familiar with that.
The biggest reason is the minimum passage score is just higher in California. When you normalize the scores between States, California is basically a standard deviation harder than NYC or Illinois.
I was surprised that this article doesn't mention that California is one of the few states that allow graduates of unaccredited law schools to sit for the bar exam. My understanding is that the bar passage rate for graduates of these programs was much lower than that of ABA-accredited institutions.
The breakout chart (towards the end) shows that ABA-accredited school graduates passed with a rate of about 60% on the first try, which seems alright, compared to a dismal 30% or less for unaccredited schools.
"Last year, just 62 percent of first-time test takers passed the California bar exam, compared with 83 percent in New York."
The 83% are also in your data if you focus on the ABA schools only. That means failure rates are 17% and 38%, respectively, or a factor of 2.2x.
The student populations of NY and CA are probably comparable, and in any case, as the article points out, the tests are largely identical; the differences mostly stem from differing score requirements.
I'm sure there will be many snide comments about lawyers in this thread, but most law students I've come across have appeared intelligent, serious, and conscientious. I doubt that a system that cuts half of them can be considered reasonable–though I'm not sure what the consequences are? Here in 'old Europe" there are limits on how often you can take such exams–usually 3x. If you fail the third time, you may have spent 8 years studying law and end up legally barred from ever getting any degree.
In NY, you can only take 3x. In CA, you can take it as many times as you want. This is one of the reasons that the "repeat taker rate" and the "aggregate rate" in CA are much worse than in NY. CA simply has a different proportion of first-time takers, since repeat takers are not cut off at any point.
When I took the bar in 2007, there was a guy who blogged about taking the bar. After learning he had failed, he continued blogging [1] about his repeat-taking experience. In all, he took the bar 11 times over 6 years before finally passing. It struck me that by the time he was a newly-minted attorney, I was a senior associate. I can't imagine how much time and money he spent on that process, and I do wonder whether the system should allow people to do this. On the other hand, he obviously really wanted it, and there's something to be said for that.
Reminds me of the joke "what do you call the guy who got LAST PLACE in medical school"
Doctor
If you set a standard, the last place guy is just as much a part of it as the first place guy. Now it might not look so good on resumes, but he is legal.
It's a pointless joke. For a high enough standard, last place is plenty good. The fact that someone is in last place says nothing about how difficult the cutoff is.
To reverse the joke: you know what they call last place in the award ceremony? Bronze medalist.
In fact, you don't even have to go to a law school to sit for the bar in California, which is not the case elsewhere. Not surprisingly, these students have much lower pass rates, and drag down the overall numbers.
Bar passage rates are falling because law schools have become increasingly theoretical. Many law professors have never had actual clients who pay them for legal work, or have worked as lawyers in the real world for less than five years. These profs are producing interesting academic scholarship but they are increasingly isolated from the legal profession. Law school classes, perhaps as result, tend not to teach what bar exams test: the elements of crimes and torts, how many witnesses are required for a will to be valid, the elements of a valid contact, and so on. These are exactly the things that Californians need their lawyers to know. If too many people are failing the bar exam, the problem isn't the exam, but the prep.
Lol, no, the bar exam is theory too. Average LSAT scores for applicants have dropped because smarter people caught on and realized law school is one of the biggest scams out there today.
As noted in the article, the exams are largely identical–only the required score is different. Having once attended a beautiful law lecture on the similarities of American Indian law and the law of high seas, I can state with some certainty that the Ivy league law schools aren't really a hotbed of teaching the daily grind of local court.
No, that's not right. The bar exam tests what you learned during BARBRI.
Law school is for learning how to do good legal research, analysis, and writing, with some exposure to a selection of substantive areas of law thrown in for good measure. At the top schools, there's also a strong focus on understanding the law through historical, philosophical, and policy-oriented contexts. Memorizing "black letter law" is not an objective. In fact, at most final exams, you can bring in a stack of study guides and reference books to look up what you don't know.
No, but a surprising number of Computer Science degrees are mislabeled. Plenty of CS programs don't even require that their students take even a single class on computer science.
Probably because it's pedantic. At most schools, if you want to major in computer stuff, you major in some sort of computer science major. In some universities, it's in the engineering school. In others, it's associated with other science programs, math in particular. There are various historic reasons for this.
People who then go to build software systems are at least hopefully applying at least some engineering principles. Software arguably often doesn't follow as well-established engineering principles as some other types of engineering. But arguing there's some great separation between computer science and engineering really is pedantic.
Is it pedantic? I think Computer Science should be taught by Computer Scientists, which is a different set of people than Software Engineers. I say this AS a Software Engineer.
Every branch of engineering and science has more theoretical and more practical aspects. Look at physics. The people who do the theory and those who design the detectors have pretty different jobs.
And universities, at least the more elite ones, always tend toward the theoretical side in all fields. Which is mostly a good thing so long as it doesn't over-rotate. Whatever language you learn is probably going to be yesterday's news in 10 years. (Unless it's COBOL :-))
[And I say this as an engineer with degrees in non-SW fields.]
It is pedantic because at some schools the degree program for people whose intention is to write software in exchange for money is "computer science" while at other schools it's "software engineering" and at yet other schools it's almost certain to be something else. Which means that arguing about which is the theoretically "correct" term has no relevance, since the names are used so interchangeably by the schools themselves.
> At most schools, if you want to major in computer stuff, you major in some sort of computer science major.
That was definitely true in the 90s, but I don't think it's been the case for years now. Most schools have degrees like Information Systems where most of the people end up who are just generally interested in computers and/or find CS too difficult. Hell I work with a guy right now whose degree (from a state university) is in "computing" whatever that means.
In my opinion, it's just a low hanging fruit some people like to hit. It's pretty clear what the GP comment meant. Comments like that make HN worse (IMO) than the pun threads on the Juicero article earlier today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14771084).
> Only 51 percent of the graduates of the University of California Hastings College of the Law passed the state’s exam in July 2016.
As a former lawyer, I was shocked by this number. Hastings is a pretty good school, and I would have guessed that the rate would be around 70%.
But it makes sense in the current economic climate. After the bust of 2008, tons of people went to law school, thinking they'd ride out the recession. But that didn't work because (1) the recession lasted too long (in the legal field, at least); (2) many people had the same idea, so there was a glut of new lawyers; and (3) big legal clients realized they had been paying too much for young associate labor. The legal market has been permanently altered in a way that makes young associates much less attractive to firms (they were previously cash cows).
Add to this the fact that tuition has skyrocketed at the UC law schools, and it's no surprise they can't attract the same quality student as before. When I attended UCLA Law a decade ago, tuition was around $20k. It has doubled since then, and interest rates are much higher. As a fellow UC, Hastings has seen similarly sharp increases.
So while my knee-jerk reaction was that this was "too low" a pass rate for Hastings, it may be that in the current economic climate this is just the new normal for Hastings. They are, I believe, the lowest-rated UC law school, having been surpassed by the new UC Irvine.
I just can't see going to law school without have a very clear career plan starting immediately on graduation. If you can do well at one of the top 5 schools or have family connections that definitely lead somewhere, that kind of thing. The risk/reward is just out of whack otherwise.
Yeah, my general advice is do not go to law school unless (1) you get into a top 3 school; (2) you get a half-scholarship to a top 10 school; or (3) you get a full scholarship to a top 20 school. And even then — don't go unless you want to be a lawyer for at least 5 years.
Starting salaries are basically the same as they were a decade ago, but tuition, cost of living, and interest rates have kept growing. As a result, the payback period has gone from ~3 years to ~6 years.
This is speculative (and similar to other comments), but I would think this is mostly about the schools holding a vested interest in being able to advertise attractive bar passage rates. I doubt it has much to do with disadvantaged students or expanding access to the profession, if you dig into it, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if it had something to do with school administrators worrying about keeping the applications, student loan money, alumni donations, etc. coming in, and the school rankings up.
If you're familiar with the legal market in California, if anything, the exam should be made more difficult. I personally thought it was overdue when Whittier shut down - put it that way.
Because the schools are passing/producing more bad grads than ever, probably, regardless of total enrollment numbers. There are two rough ways to take this:
A. The bar is needlessly high, its just gatekeeping credentialism
B. The median school output (the median grad) is increasingly worse.
I think the actual issue is B. I think its worse than most people want to admit. It stuck out to me when I was doing a little reading about why CS enrollment seems so low[1]. Quoting my own findings here:
> What supports this theory? Can we prove aptitude is flat? Kinda. In 1970s 1-in-2 college grads aced Wordsum test. Today 1-in-6 do.[2] Using that as a proxy for IQ of the median college grad, in the 70’s it was ~112, now its ~100.
> In other words we have more people going to college than ever, but the “average grad” is less intelligent than ever. Degrees are increasingly diluted yet expensive. You can pay more money than ever to show that you are of average intelligence.
And California State is trying to push more grads through than ever, so I wonder just how comparable the pool of talent is vs other states.
> With the CSU remedial overhaul they are redefining “college readiness” as “willingness to pay the cash”. They are giving college credit for courses that 8th graders could complete. This is the most provable reduction in academic rigor I’ve seen, and it’s happening in the largest college system in the US. If anyone can explain why we shouldn’t be unhappy with a future of thousands of college grads with 8th grade reading skills, I’m all ears for the optimism.
> What’s weirder, their stated reasons for doing this are to “raise graduation rates.” That’s it. More dollars in the door, more college grads with 8th grade reading levels out.
> Much of the flight from law school reflects the brutal reality of the employment market for lawyers. The National Association for Law Placement reports that fewer than half of lawyers graduating in 2011 eventually landed jobs in a law firm. Only 65 percent found positions requiring passage of the bar exam. At a time when many law school graduates are shouldering student-loan debts of $125,000 or more, compensation has declined painfully — the median starting salary for new lawyers in 2012 was just $61,000. And quite a few can’t find any work at all: Nine months after receiving their law degrees, 11.2 percent of the class of 2013 was unemployed.
In light of this, why is declining enrollment bad precisely, as the deans of law schools suggest in the NYT? Anything other than vested interest?
[1] (My theory is that CS enrollment is about flat because aptitude is about flat, and that rising college enrollment numbers don't represent the production of more smart people at all, they are totally masked by issues like this. CS is flat because its hard and not easy to fake your way through. More about the educational decline here: https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/why-is-computer-science-enr...)
As a lawyer who took and passed the California bar exam on the first attempt, I think that this move by the California Supreme Court was absolutely necessary. I have seen too many of my qualified peers fail this exam for no reason. These individuals end up passing on their second and third attempts and all that this exam did is cost them more time and money that they could have been using to become better lawyers. I'm happy to see that there is some accountability on the state bar examiners to make sure the test is graded fairly.
This will hopefully create a more inexpensive option for lawyers that just need to file paperwork and look over documents, etc. It may make fighting patents cheaper.
I do wish the article mentioned if passing rates were dropping till now or they've been the same and this is the breaking point. A specific school's plunge in recent years does make me think this is not entirely good, but doesn't represent the state as a whole.
In the US there is also a large class of legal workers called paralegals that don't need to pass the bar. They usually (always?) work under a lawyer, though. The paralegal is generally responsible for running the day-to-day part of some specific aspect of a legal practice. They are analogous to nurses or physician's assistant in a medical practice, but for the legal profession. So they are not layers, exactly, but often do the same kind of things.
ABA Standard 501(b) states that "A law school shall not admit an applicant who does not appear capable of satisfactorily completing its program of legal education and being admitted to the bar."
If passing %s are falling while the cutoff is unchanged, the solution is not to change the cutoff.
Also, the school for "disadvantaged students" being singled out in the article is hilarious.
Hmm, maybe. How many people take the bar exam from non-accredited institutions? My understanding it was a much lower percentage, and if that's the case then it wouldn't weigh very much on the overall passage rate.
California's bar exam is notoriously difficult to pass compared to other states. Whether that nets fewer stupid lawyers here than other states, maybe so, but I know of a few very intelligent people who did not pass the CA exam.
I seem to recall that most states require you not only to pass their bar exam, but also to have graduated from a recognized law school. California, by contrast, only requires you to pass the exam, but it's much harder than most, since they can't rely on the law school for a certain amount of sanity checking.
> The move follows a sometimes furious debate in California legal circles over whether the state’s passing score, or “cut score” — 144 — was unrealistic.
If the passing score were unrealistic, there would be no lawyers in CA. Since there are lawyers in CA, the passing score is both realistic and achievable.
I'm not an attorney in CA, but I imagine the score measures both intelligence and knowledge in the field. Why shouldn't a prospective attorney be required to score 100% on knowledge? That seems reasonable to me, at least for the area of law they will practice.
My calc 3 professor once said that he could make a test where everyone got a 100% or where everyone got a 0%, but neither test would tell him anything about the classes skill.
The bar exam isn't designed for people to get 100%. They pick 10-20 different topics and test you on them. Virtually nobody knows all the answers. And nobody needs to know all the answers. Most attorneys will use maybe 1-3 of those topics on a daily basis. And you don't operate without reference materials in the real world. At one point I memorized what the requirements for a legal cheque, but I'd look it up in a book if I needed to know now.
If you actually made of test of basic legal principles that all lawyers should know, it would probably be an easier test. The hardest part of the bar exam is the scope of the material.
I think a high barrier for becoming a lawyer is a good thing. But the bar exam is the wrong time to make the cut. The person already spent 3 years and maybe hundreds of thousand of dollars.
If California wants to make sure their lawyers are smart, they should just require an LSAT score of 155+ to get barred. There is a very high LSAT / Bar exam correlation and you weed people out before they waste 7% of their career.
> The person already spent 3 years and maybe hundreds of thousand of dollars.
The rest of your post seems well argued to me (I have no experience with law school), but surely this part is irrelevant. If someone, after spending howsoever much time and money, isn't qualified to be a lawyer, then he or she shouldn't be a lawyer; there shouldn't be any certification by the state just for effort, or financial expenditure.
(The rest of your post seems to pursue the alternate argument that the CA cut-off is too high, giving many false negatives, and that is an argument that appeals to my selfishness: if I can't find a lawyer at a reasonable price because the state has, intentionally or not, stifled competition among potentially competent lawyers, then my interests have not been served.)
> I think a high barrier for becoming a lawyer is a good thing. But the bar exam is the wrong time to make the cut. The person already spent 3 years and maybe hundreds of thousand of dollars.
> If California wants to make sure their lawyers are smart, they should just require an LSAT score of 155+ to get barred.
To rephrase: we can predict a person's bar exam score with very high accuracy from their LSAT score. (This is an example of the general principle "all IQ tests are closely related to each other".) It's a stupid idea to have them spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education they're doomed to fail when we could tell them in advance that they shouldn't bother.
The fact that this process is incredibly wasteful seems relevant to the argument, no? If you took the bar exam after spending twenty minutes and fifty bucks, it wouldn't really matter that it didn't provide any more information on the testees than their LSAT scores had already provided.
> To rephrase: we can predict a person's bar exam score with very high accuracy from their LSAT score. (This is an example of the general principle "all IQ tests are closely related to each other".) It's a stupid idea to have them spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education they're doomed to fail when we could tell them in advance that they shouldn't bother.
That seems like an argument for not having the bar exam, which is (at least in my state of ignorance about the subject) a reasonable thing to argue. However, that does not seem to be the position of the sentence you quoted, immediately before the one I quoted:
> But the bar exam is the wrong time to make the cut.
If there is a bar exam, then when it is taken is, I think, exactly the right time to make the cut.
Even with those sentences quoted as context, I still think that the time and money spent in the study of law is irrelevant to whether someone should be accredited, by whatever process. (That doesn't mean that I think that it is irrelevant full stop; I agree that it is deeply relevant to the student, and probably to society as a whole.) Nonetheless, I meant in my original post to argue literally only with the one sentence that I quoted, which is why I did not give the context, and not to argue with the rest of the post, which seemed eminently sound and which I agree should probably be interpreted as you have done.
> That seems like an argument for not having the bar exam, which is (at least in my state of ignorance about the subject) a reasonable thing to argue. However, that does not seem to be the position of the sentence you quoted, immediately before the one I quoted
It is the position of the sentence I quoted, as you can see by following my quotation all the way through to:
>> If California wants to make sure their lawyers are smart, they should just require an LSAT score of 155+ to get barred.
It seems like there might be a confusion over the concepts "bar exam", meaning "any exam that allows or prohibits the practice of law by a testee", and "bar exam", meaning "the test given to law school graduates who wish to practice law, under the American legal education system".
A bar exam in the first sense makes the cut by definition -- it is the cut, and therefore the cut cannot be made at any other time. But the bar exam in the first sense does not occur at any particular time. rhino369 has made a perfectly coherent argument that the bar exam in the second sense, the real bar exam as it occurs in American practice, which is given at a particular time, is given at the wrong time, that it should be given before students go to law school and in fact should really just be replaced by the LSAT (already given at the appropriate time) because it isn't informative taken in addition to the LSAT anyway.
Your post is somewhat of a strawman. I never wrote that someone should know all of the law, but that I believe they should know the law in the area they will be practicing.
I'm not an attorney, however my experience has shown me there are multiple kinds of practitioners of law. I have had various attorneys on the stand in mediation where they looked foolish in front of the mediation panel due to not knowing off the top of their heads the subjects they purported to be expert. There are no reference materials for them to look anything up at that point.
Why? I wouldn't expect any lawyer to have the law completely memorized. I'd rather hire one that spends their time studying cases and strategies, and has to look up the details of statutes once in a while.
> Why? I wouldn't expect any lawyer to have the law completely memorized.
That isn't what I wrote. In any case it's not what I meant.
I'm not an attorney, however my experience has shown me there are various kinds of practitioners of law. I have had tax attorneys and business attorneys on the stand in mediation where they looked foolish in front of the mediation panel due to not knowing off the top of their heads the subjects they purported to be expert. There are no reference materials for them to look anything up at that point.
This is a great example of a statistic that is interesting but needs more context to be useful. Did the authors check to see whether other California law schools saw a similar decline? If so, why call out Whittier? If not, wouldn't that suggest that the problem is with Whittier and not with the bar program? What am I supposed to infer, being told only that at least one school saw a decline?
Edit: I looked it up. There apparently aren't reported numbers for Whittier because fewer than 11 of their students sat for the bar exam for the first time in 2017. So the statistic is even less useful than I suspected.