Did you pass the bar?

Last week we got a cryptic e-mail from the Dean telling us that last year’s graduating class scored higher than usual for this school on the Florida bar. I thought it was odd that he didn’t give us the scoring percentages but I guess there’s no mystery because fortunately, Prof. Froomkin has provided us the numbers. It looks like 85.7 percent of 2006 graduates who took the Florida bar passed. That’s terrific. I think that’s about 5 percentage points higher than in the past few years – and this comes despite a higher score needed to pass.

But the professor also goes on to say that even though we had the second highest bar passage rate of schools in Florida, that shouldn’t mean we are the second best law school in the state. I don’t know what to make of his first reason – which is that many students take bars in other states and this score doesn’t reflect those people’s results. I think that if, as the professor writes, “these out-of-state test takers include many of the best and most motivated students” those people are probably passing their out-of-state bars. So that makes it a moot point, right? Surely the majority of students – and probably well over 50.1 percent of us – are taking the Florida bar, right? Anyway, I don’t understand the relevance of this point.

His second reason, which is that law school shouldn’t be a three-year bar prep class, is strange. If I understand the reasoning, he’s suggesting that the bar exam has nothing to do with actually being a lawyer. (Actually, we all know the exam is a ridiculous hoop that everyone has to go through that has little to do with measuring your ability to be a lawyer; for proof that the process makes no sense, just remember last summer when Kathleen Sullivan, former dean of Stanford law school and the author of our Constitutional Law casebook failed the California bar exam…Do you really think the public needs to be protected from one of the sharpest Con Law scholars in the country?).

Instead, law school teaches the reasoning and thinking skills that lawyers need. But there’s an obvious problem with this logic: no matter how brilliant you are and regardless of how incredible your critical thinking and analysis skills, if you don’t pass the bar exam, you can’t use those skills as a lawyer.

Presumably law schools – or the law school process – should also prepare one for the bar exam. So maybe the problem is with the system. I’m not planning to fight the system, but it seems to me that if one goal of a law school is to produce outstanding lawyers who will do great things in the legal world, then bar passage rate is the key.