Last week, I wrote about the apparent efforts to make the NextGen Bar Exam far simpler that the current exam. I received an email from a person who worked as a state board of law examiners. With permission, I reproduce the email, stripping any reference to the person’s state.
I was an Assistant to the *** Board of Law Examiners when the *** Supreme Court decided to adopt the UBE [Uniform Bar Exam]. The sales pitch for the UBE from the NCBE, as presented to the group of assistant bar examiners I was among, was threefold. First, it won’t be any worse that the current bar exam. Second, it will be better for the applicants because they will have more flexibility in deciding to which state they should move. Third, everybody else is doing it. None of those explanations supports such a dramatic change in public policy as the adoption of the UBE and the abandonment of a state-specific essay test. For my part, I asked two questions: If the UBE is not an affirmative improvement over the status quo, why should we change? Why should the *** Supreme Court elevate the applicants’ interests in residential flexibility over ensuring that ***’s new lawyers have demonstrated some level of competence in *** law? I did not receive satisfactory answers to either question. The Board and the other assistants seemed inclined to blindly defer to the so-called expertise of the NCBE and generally unwilling to consider the consequences of the policy change.