What's the bar exam like anyway?

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human Hey, I'm Nora Jones and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast, called Playing Along, is Back. I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting. Every episode is a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians. Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Lavey, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name. And this season, I've sat down with Black Pumas, Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, and more. Check out my new episode with John Legend. I feel like, in a lot of ways, our career is a paralleled in some ways, but it is never intersected for some reason. I know. Listen to Nora Jones's playing along on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Who would you call if the Inthinkable happened? I said there was about 22 times. A police officer, right? But what do you do when the monster is the man in blue? This dude is the devil. He hurt you. This is the story of a detective who thought he was above the law, until we came together to take him down. I said you're going to see my face to the day that you die. Listen to the girlfriend's untouchable on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, as our annual custom, we are raising money for our favorite charity, The Cooperative for Education, which helps break the cycle of poverty and Guatemala by making sure that kids who otherwise wouldn't have an education get to school. That's right, and here's this year's Call to Action. You can join co-ed for $20 a month to collectively sponsor students in the Rise Youth Development Program, and if you set up that gift by December 19th, you can have a chance to win a virtual Zoom Hangout with Josh and I. We do it every year and it's a lot of fun. That's right, you can go to cooperative4education.org/SYSK, set up your $20 a month sponsorship. You can also go make a one-time donation if you like, and we may see you for a virtual Hangout this January. Thank you for giving. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. 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, root and tuton, rooty fruity episodes of Stuff You Should Know, rooty 2D fresh and fruity. That's right, I forgot the rest of it, but yes, you knew what I was laying down. Can I shock you, right off the bat? Yes. I don't think I have ever been in an iHop restaurant in Eden. I don't think so. See, this is normally where I'd be like, "What?" Yeah. But I don't think you're missing enough to warrant a what? Yeah, I mean, if it was always waffle house, if we were going to do something like that. So, yeah, never been in an iHop. 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. They're menus are different enough, the vibes different enough. Is iHop more relatable to like a dinnies? Yes. Okay. I've been to dinnies, but not much. Okay, then you don't need to go to iHop. Can we thank the listener who suggested this episode? Yeah, I remember the email, but I don't remember their name. Yeah, because 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 going to go with Garen Desi. That's a great name. Garen Desi? I like Garen Desi more because of the Desi part. 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. But 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 whatnot, so links they'll go to to finish? Yeah, yeah, I think I do remember that actually. Well, save it. Save it. 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 the world 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. 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 business end. Right. Where they, yeah, where you're not really supposed to go past or also bailiff will jump on you. Yeah, exactly. I remember there was a local news story once about a judge who'd been drinking like during work. Uh-huh. And like they followed him like on his lunch hour and followed him into like a place where he's drinking. Uh-huh. 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. That's so lazy. It is. But I mean, I thought it was pretty good to tell you the truth. Yeah. Well, that's like when, uh, on the old days when we were writers for HouseofWorks.com. And like a shining week is when I wrote a clever, uh, what do you call the thing under the picture? Caption. Caption. Now I can even remember caption with the word caption. It's been a while. It's been a while. Do you remember any good ones? No, no. But I was like, hey, I'm late. Check this out. I wrote a clever caption. It was my first professional writing job. So I was, uh, you know, showing pride. Now I remember that we used to tell one another a great clever caption. Yeah. Look at this one. Music lyrics we'd fit into articles that we just thought we were so sly about. Yeah. And now we just say dumb things with our mouths. Right. Well, I feel like we've shaken off all of the curious lawyers who don't normally listen to us. We can get started, everybody. Um, 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 not, it's not just some tests that lawyers have to take to get licensed, which 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 the 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. It's socially speaking, culturally speaking, sociocultural speaking. Yeah. Because you don't want to end up with the Lionel Huts, right? No, he almost certainly did not pass the bar. 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. Um, 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. To buy us to the curious lawyers. 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. Right. 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. 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. 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. And if you got it right, 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. I imagine a lot of that, depending on the judge that you got, and maybe how much they liked you in those early days, it was really sort of the Wild Wild West. 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 on attorney. So great, man. Yeah. Yeah, I love that story, too. I mean, I can just see Lincoln busting it out so casually. Yeah, I think the takeaway is the guy didn't even know the test had begun, essentially. No, he had no idea. Exactly. I'm glad you added that part. So the actual first written bar exam, kind of like they are today, that popped up around 1855, I think a Massachusetts, and then it became a requirement about 20 years later in Suffolk County where Boston wasn't by 1920 written exams were like the way to go. And because now it wasn't just getting quizzed with the judge, law school 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, yeah, 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. 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 they, you know, 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 the 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 call 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 what you're going to get, yeah, exactly what you're going to get more these days in the bar exam. Yeah, but one of the problems with taking a test like that is that your hand can get cramped, they didn't want perspective 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 can say this is right, this is wrong. And it wasn't just legal terms, they were applying it to hypithetical situations, but it was still multiple choice so you could grade it much more easily. Yeah, I don't know how I feel about multiple choice in a test like this. And anytime you can sort of guess, right, I don't think you can necessarily guess your way to success, but I don't know. I think you just came up with a t-shirt guess your way to success. Yeah, totally. And then on the back, just a ABCD and just a check mark next to the C all the above all the above. Go ahead. 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 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 and 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. 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, 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. Yeah, and you know, since then, especially in like the 1970s, there, there seem to be like a series of lawsuits from black lawyers in different states that were suing over various what they thought were, you know, discriminatory policies within the test. I don't think many of those were successful though, were they? No, the one that sticks out the most that I've heard the most described as, well, just basically a good example of the lawsuits that came around at this time as Tyler versus Vickery or Tyler V Vickery, if you're a lawyer. 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 tests that they introduced that they had basically been introduced and in design 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. But they also said, here's the thing, 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, I'm not, I don't know much about lawyer stuff in my, I know spit about lore. In my, in my civilian mind, I see that as kind of a punt, legally speaking. And maybe that was that 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. I don't know, that felt like a punt to me by just saying like, well, they're not an employer and an agency or labor organization, so we're just sort of not going to hear this one. Yeah, and this, 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 judges 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. Yeah, I just find it fascinating. Yeah, totally. Should we wrap up sort of the testing stuff and then take care of it? Yeah, let's get back into the evolution of the test again. 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 multistate essay examination at this point. So now you're back to essaying, which is how it previously had been until that multiple choice test. Right. And in '97, it handed over the multistate performance test or the MPT, which says, hey, let's sort of do some practice stuff. Like write up a brief for me or write out a memo or draft a memo and 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. Yeah, which is, you know, if you're a state and you don't feel like going to the trouble coming up with your entire, your own bar exam, now you can just use the UBE. Yeah. And it's proven like 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 of 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. Yeah, but it did make it like more easy to transfer from state to state and stuff like that. Right. And we'll get into those specifics too, but let's take that break. Okay. We'll get into the basics of the bar right after this. Hey, I'm Nora Jones and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is Back. Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leyve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweety, really too many to name. I feel like, in a lot of ways, our career is a parallel in some ways, but it's just never intersected for so many years. I know. Listen to Nora Jones playing along on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Who would you call if the unthinkable happened? I just fail and start a screaming. If you lost someone you loved in the most horrific way. The police, right? But what if the person you're supposed to go to for help is the one you're the most afraid of? This dude is the devil, he's a snake, he hurt you. I hurt you, I hurt you, I hurt you. I'm Niki Richardson, and this is The Girlfriends Untouchable. Detected Roger Golupski spent decades intimidating and sexually abusing Black women across Kansas City, using his police badge to scare them into silence. This is the story of a detective who seemed above the law until we came together to take him down. I told Roger Golupski I said you're gonna see my face to the day that you die. Listen to The Girlfriends Untouchable on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, as our annual custom, we are raising money for our favorite charity, The Cooperative for Education, which helps break the cycle of poverty in Guatemala by making sure that kids who otherwise wouldn't have an education get to school. And here's this year's Call to Action. You can join COED for $20 a month to collectively sponsor students in the Rise Youth Development Program. And if you set up that gift by December 19th, you can have a chance to win a virtual Zoom Hangout with Josh and I. That's right, you can go to cooperative for education.org/SYSK, set up your $20 a month sponsorship. You can also go make a one-time donation if you like and we may see you for a virtual Hangout this January. So Chuck, it turns out there's 56 jurisdictions in the United States. I didn't. 50 states plus some territories. You got some overseas possessions. You got, you know, what else? So there's 56 and each jurisdiction 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 and it's up to this agency that's associated with the highest court in the state, usually the state supreme court. Yeah, exactly. And 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 apprentice ship to swap out law school, which I think is super kind of cool. Yeah. And Maine in New York let you sub out like a year or two of that law school for an apprenticeship. Yeah, for sure, which is pretty neat. It's old school. It's a throwback kind of thing. Yeah. 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 a thousand dollars depending on your state and how greedy they are. Yeah. 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. Yeah. You're going to have to pay a fee for that. And the reason why is because there is no chance you're going to be allowed to bring your own laptop. No. Because they keep 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. Wow. Really? Yeah, that's happened. And apparently it's not just an isolated thing that they have a bowl of tampons. Wow. And 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 some it's like there's no way you're bringing your own laptop in it. Yeah, or tampon. Exactly. So wow, I never knew that. That's a nice little tidbit. Thanks. I thought that was pretty great too. 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 and 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 a B-A-R-B-R-I barbary. It can be up to $6,000, maybe as low as 1,800 bucks. And they have been around since the 1950s. And I was, I was like, what is barbary stand for? And I had a weirdly hard time finding out what it stood for until a 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, they merged in the 70s, I think. And it was just the names of two companies. I think Bay Area Review was B-A-R and the Bar Review Inc was B-R-I. And so they just watched those together. So kind of a boring story. I had seen that it was a merger of Barbizon modeling school and a brief, meaning the makers of breachies around the world. Wow. That's a, that's a mashup I could enjoy. Right. And the $6,000 one that you can pay for like the premium test prep. They actually have somebody to 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. 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. Okay. So you don't get your money back, but you get to retake the course at no charge. No. Barbizon modeling is long had a motto, you don't get your money back. Right. Yeah, exactly. 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 out in the three parts that kind of came along separately. The first remember was that multiple choice test, the multi-state bar examination. Yeah. There's 200 multiple choice questions. I've seen 175. I guess it depends on. I don't know your jurisdiction and how much have valuable they find 25 questions. Yeah, maybe. But it covers seven different areas of the law. You want to take them? Sure. Simple procedure contracts. Of course, of course, torts, Constitutional law, criminal law that sexes law, careful, criminal on procedure that is evidence, which is its own category and real property. And that is 50 percent of the UBE score. Then the, the other two are the multi-state SA once again, which is 30 percent. And then the two multi-state performance tests tasks. And that is 20 percent. Yeah. 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 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. Yeah. Oh, well, we should mention two. 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. Good point. And scotch at the end of the day, of course. That's right. 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 like, 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 insight 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, use the bar. 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, you discussed us. Like that is just sad. So yeah, it's not really cool to, to flex on people over your bar score and you pass exactly that matters. That's right. And then if you do pass, there's always a gaggle of attorneys, usually quite experienced season 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. Sam. 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. Right. They're transferable for two to five years after taking the exam. It depends on the jurisdiction, of course. And then if they, 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, what you were talking about earlier that third test, which is like a 60 question ethics test. Right. It's called the multi-state professional responsibility examination, the MPRE. Yes. 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 in the prison. There's attorney Hutz guilty of loving too much. Right. Was that a real Simpson thing? No. Okay, because I could see that. They only really talked about pot like on a couple of really great episodes, but you know. No, that wasn't their bag normally. That wasn't their bag or pot. No, yeah, that wasn't their sack. Don't use that word. Yeah, that's going to gross it. Moist. Oh boy. What was the other one? Moist sack or pussy. Go look that up in the transcript. Don't do it. Let's talk about pass rates because it really obviously depends on the state. They can very pretty wildly actually from looking at some of these stats. I think for first timers from July of this year's testing, 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, 50, 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. Oh, it's widely considered a really easy state to pass the bar. Oh, is it really? Yeah. Oh, interesting. Okay. Some very hard places to take the bar around the world. Actually, I saw Nigeria, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Ontario, Canada, Canada, 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 definitely varies by jurisdiction and by country, just how hard it can be. 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 credited schools pass within a couple of years. From what I see, there's really no shame for it to take a cracker to pass the bar. I don't think, I don't know if it's something you're going to 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 I think JFK, which is DIMs, JFK Jr. I think took two or three times to pass. I saw that. And Oh, Kim Kardashian took a time or two. Yeah, I think three, three. And there's actually limits on how many times you can take it, depending on your state, your jurisdiction, your territory. Oh, well, they just say, sorry, it sounds like you should try another line of work. There are some places that say that. I don't know if they actually say that. The gaggle of attorneys tell 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. 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, I mean, it's great. Like you see somebody referred to like, oh, this is a lawyer or something, but they have it like there in some field has nothing to do with law. Yeah, you're just like they very frequently are advisors. Like just they know how how far you can bend the law. Okay, a lot of stuff you can do with it. All right. Yeah, you can always teach. I imagine. Oh, yeah, that's you. I have a little cute little addition, a dendom to this part. Let's go. The youngest person ever to pass the bar is Sophia Park. She passed the bar in 2024 age 17, 17 years, eight months. And was that after law school, even? Yeah, she started law school at 13. She's one of those. 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 enough? The smart family. It is. They really wanted to be lawyers. Yeah, or, or, you know, are they practicing law or are they just like I just wanted to show off? Oh, I believe they're both practicing law. Yeah, I guess so. Well, should we take another break? Chuck, I guess we should. Well, the one more little tidbit here at the end, you know, we said that it's 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 an accredited law school, a certain percentage of your graduates have to pass the bar within two years. Otherwise, your accreditation goes away. Yeah, I saw 75% of your graduates have to pass. All right, or they're like, sorry, I guess you're not teaching well enough. Exactly. I wanted my tidbit to be last. So I'm just going to repeat it now. Okay. I had one second thought we'll just go to break. How about that? All right, we'll be right back. I feel like, in a lot of ways, our career is a parallel in some ways, but he's just never intersected for some reason. Listen to Nora Jones's Playing Along on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I just feel as though I'd scream in. If you lost someone you loved in the most horrific way, the police, right? I'm Nikki Richardson, and this is The Girlfriends Untouchable. Detective Roger Gleupski spent decades intimidating and sexually abusing Black women across Kansas City, using his police badge to scare them into silence. This is the story of a detective who seemed above the law, until we came together to take him down. I tell Roger Gleupski, I say, "You're gonna see my face to the day that you die." Listen to The Girlfriends Untouchable on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can join co-ed for $20 a month to collectively sponsor students in the Rise Youth Development Program, and if you set up that gift by December 19th, you can have a chance to win a virtual Zoom Hangout with Josh and I, we do it every year, and it's a lot of fun. That's right, you can go to co-operative4education.org/SYSK, set up your $20 a month sponsorship, you can also go make a one-time donation if you like, and we may see you for a virtual Hangout this January. 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. You know, we've mentioned some of the stuff while it was developing basically, you know, 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 you know, that's a problem because when you're practicing attorney like a lot of opinion, you know, 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. 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 these 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 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 somebody gets to law school and goes to take the bar. And that the bar exam is just showing us it's just reflecting this problem elsewhere. So again, stop looking at the bar is essentially with the NCB. It also kind of sounds like we're just a part of the grand history of systemic discrimination throughout our country. So that's a critique of them two people are like that's your answer like you were just perpetuating an already existing racial disparity like that's essentially what they're saying in that argument. Yeah, it's definitely a strange argument. Other people say that, you know, just part of that disparity is, you know, the cost associated with law school and to be a successful candidate. 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 just sort of all in the big soup of privilege, you know. Right. I saw that black and Hispanic students who take the bar exam are 50% likely or to work during their bar prep period. Yeah, then white student like it's just logistically speaking, racially speaking, it's just much like clear 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. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the other critiques is that, you know, it's a memorization test and it there been plenty of studies that show that it doesn't necessarily isn't a marker toward your future performance as an attorney or you're like you're how successful you may be. Right. There was a study in 2024 from Nevada that compared scores on the 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. Yeah, those low correlations or whereas low is 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 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 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? Like what is legal competence and this is where the national conference of board examiners like pull their shirt away from their necks and you can see like some sweat breaking 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. People say like the bar exam under that that description is by definition invalid 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. You know what you just sounded like what an attorney sounds like you just drop 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 them. There have also been a lot of just sort of disasters in recent years very public wins in terms of the bar during covid they offered remote exams and it was just sort of a joke in a lot of cases they were a lot of computer. Problems like programs crashing they had facial recognition issues in that sometimes they failed to identify dark skin test takers so that's that's bad right off the bat. You also again you know 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. Yeah if you want to know how tough Loyola University law students are there you go. What about California with the chat GPT questions this one it's got a lot of shot and Freud 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 issued 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 assays. Can you imagine finishing an essay and like to save it and they're like no sorry do it again that's every students nightmare 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 chat GPT it turned out was involved because some students were like they're like our misspellings and typos and some of these multiple choice questions and the California state bar said wait what. Yeah turns out that some of those questions were chat be 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. And this was another case of lawyer 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 to so right again there's like a little bit of shot and for it to yeah 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 you know people are like you know we should help you are right. And the test proctors were like no everyone be quiet and like you know just keep taking your test and we'll deal with this in the next lunch break. 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. 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 may were tending to the guy. But they're like we need to keep shooting like go move that big fake rock in front of the paramedics so we can keep shooting. I guess it's better than the director being like take that fake rock and finish them off with it. Yeah yeah and then drag them out of the way 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 the stage in life or something. I wondered about like a really experienced attorney years later if they took the bar again and Olivia dug into that and found a study from 2021 16 like successful experience practicing attorneys from Oklahoma. Retook the bar essentially with no prep it was just like you know their prep was their career on the theory that hey if it's if it's measuring ability then this should bear out in the in the grades and none of them pass they got scores ranging from 26 to 52% so nobody would have passed that bar and and the lawyers who have been practicing long as did the worst out of all of them. And then one general criticism of the bar exam to in addition to everything else we've just talked about is that it doesn't in any real way kind of jive with what these lawyers are going to do in the legal profession right 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 lowering after you graduate and go through the bar and become an attorney is open book research to figure out what 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. Yeah for sure and because of that there are a lot of jurisdictions it have long had work around some alternatives and there are changes on the horizon for the bar itself Wisconsin it's only state I guess only jurisdiction that never stopped saying hey you went to law school and you can practice law in the state you don't have to take the bar here which is pretty cool I think you have to graduate from one of the states to 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 can be admitted to practice law without the bar. Yeah and we said earlier that the law school was originally created as an alternative to a apprenticeship some states have gone the other way now where the apprenticeships are alternatives to law school like it's a path like that. I like it too for mountain 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 you can become a lawyer without the bar exam if you apprentice for I think 675 hours over four weeks and supervised work you will basically become a lawyer after that. Four weeks four months now four weeks four years now I was joking there's only six hundred and seventy five hours in four weeks so I've. Okay so just doing 24 hours a day for a month as an apprentice which seems like four I'll assume your math checks out it does I even used a calculator no 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 Jan bar exam right. 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 all right. Two things that I saw there 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. And 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. 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. But it did text him of 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 the most standardized test. But as far as being an indicator of how you'll be as a practitioner yet 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 to know how to do that. As someone who's taken hundreds of depositions you learn by watching listening to more experience 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 you know know what they were doing right. And then said one thing he would like to see change is like I think more emphasis on writing he said I see so many briefs written by someone who allegedly pass a bar they're 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 dragging on the bar might not be a good look I think that's smart yeah you got anything else I got nothing else well thanks for tapping your anonymous friend that was good info sure. 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. It'd be kind of fun I mean if it was free I would take the bar exam just a like with zero knowledge of anything just to see like how poorly I would do. Yeah I would too I'd be right next to you peeing in my seat and going into labor and having a heart attack. Wouldn't that be funny though if we got like I don't know even like a 20% or something or if we passed and we just automatically became lawyers yeah let's do it alright. Alright this is about the salt and sea you call for listener mail right. Alright hey guys I was listening to the salt and sea episode in college I took an ocean geography class and learned about inland seas. An inland sea because remember we sort of wondered a 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 have a 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 this class spot is 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? An island sea or inland sea. He says island but probably meant inland. Okay I didn't know I had no idea whether it's an island sea or an inland sea I had no idea. Or Dylan's favorite sea is the Larapintine Sea or the Larapintine Sea. It's an ancient sea that split Australia and half during the Cambrian explosion. Being a long time listener and learning about new things is the best part of my commute guys that is from Dylan. Thanks a lot Dylan that was great info. I still like your interpretation Chuck which I remember correctly you were saying that an inland lake would be landlocked I think. Yeah I mean it sounds like there's no true definition I don't know. Well then let's keep going with yours. Great nice try Dylan. If you want to be like Dylan and send us a great email you can send it off to [email protected]. Stuff you 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. Hey I'm Nora Jones and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along Is Back. Every episode is a little different but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians. Over the past two seasons I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Lavey, Mavis Staples, Remi Wolf, Jeff Tweety, really too many to name. And this season I've sat down with Black Pumas, Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin and more. I feel like in a lot of ways our career is a paralleled in some ways but it is never intersected for some reason. I know. We don't know which way to go. Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This dude is the devil, he hurt you. This is the story of a detective who thought he was above the law until we came together to take him down. Listen to the girlfriend's untouchable on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Right, and here's this year's Call to Action. You can join co-ed for $20 a month to collectively sponsor students in the Rise Youth Development Program. Guaranteed Human.