There was an article in the Times on Feb. 25 about the antitrust claim brought against Bar-Bri. Unfortunately, the article is now archived and only accessible with a paid account. Regardless, there was an editorial by a practicing attorney in today's Times about why bar review courses are necessary.
The gist of the editorial is that law school "[o]ften leaves graduates with huge debts and little practical knowledge necessary to pass the various state bar exams. This both necessitates the bar review courses and makes them such a crucial aspect of the final phase of becoming a practicing attorney." The author goes on to point out that, "It would be unimaginable for medical schools to prepare prospective physicians so inadequately that they could not practice medicine without first taking an intensive course designed to give them all the knowledge and skills they didn’t learn in school."
My suspicion is that Paul Campos is again working under a pseudonym.
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The editorial is available through Westlaw, and is worth reading.
The article or editorial? The link to the editorial is good for the next few days...
My bad--the article. Just look up "Young Lawyers Sue, and Little Changes" in natural language in the NYTimes database.
Hmmm...
So the primary function of law school professors is to teach, but they don't prepare us for the bar exam. They are given "tenure," which prohibits them from being fired, even though, to paraphrase, they prepare us so inadequately to practice law that we must first take an intensive course designed to give us all the knowledge and skills we didn’t learn in school.
Additionally, we are provided with snow-delayed grades that are set on an arbitrary curve not mandated by any formal organization, that are primarily determined by professors that cannot be fired, that may or may not be relevant to the practice of law, and that these grades are probably not truly indicative as how we will do in a courtroom/boardroom in the future.
And all this costs thousands of dollars. Who knew the power of a shared experience could be the basis of an entire profession? Fan-f**king-tastic.
I guess that was a bit overstated. I never knew what promissory estoppel was before Law School, and I do now, and that'll probably be on the Bar Exam... So I've got that going for me, which is nice.
LSATs, law school rankings, law school, law school exams, law student rankings, MPRE, Bar/Bri, bar exams, bar associations, law firm rankings, and partnership tracks are simply a well-established succession of barriers to entry, as well as a faulty meritocracy. (Ever think about why Yale Law doesn't give grades?) The more money you force people to throw at something, the less likely they are to invest, and the more money there is for the chosen few. Other countries accomplish the same result through nationwide exams, or apprenticeships. In other words, both editorials deserve a "thank you, captain obvious" seal of approval. (TM application pending)
Family law is a creature of each individual state, so it doesn't make practical sense to teach Colorado Family Law, and other areas that are heavily state dependent, to students that are planning on practicing in other states.
I just sat through a course on how to pass the MPRE and if law school courses were taught like that one, they'd certainly be much more straightforward, but they'd also be boring as hell. (Maybe that's the case with current law school courses, but I would hope that there's been at least a couple of courses you've enjoyed in law school.) Additionally, knowing how to “practice law” is not a corollary of passing the bar.
That said, I agree that the traditional law school curriculum does a poor job of preparing students to competently practice law, (at least from my experience at CU, but I can’t believe it’s alone on this one). In fact externships and clinics are the only things I've experienced that even remotely begin to ready you for practicing law.
The only thing that the majority of courses in law school prepare you for is being a law professor. And while law professors think law school is a great experience in which you have the “opportunity” to learn and absorb “the law,” it leaves the majority of students feeling disgruntled and burned out by their third year.
How can we fix it? What about requiring that all students complete a clinic? Or requiring a year of externships? Or allowing full-time, full-semester externships? Thoughts?
Simple: two years of the same 'ole, same 'ole, and a yearlong apprenticeship.
I'm having trouble seeing why it doesn't make sense to teach Colorado Family Law. Don't 90% of our graduates remain in state?
And we admit at least 50% Colorado residents, by statute. So why DON'T we teach Colorado law at the Uni-frickin'-versity of Colorado?
And for the record, all efforts by this student to improve the quality of practical education at CU through more clinical & intern/extern hours applying toward graduation have been met with a gigantic back-o'-the-hand.
I guess I'm not law professor material. Who's getting drunk on Saint Paddy's with me? 12 days and a wake up...
What I meant by practical sense is not losing out-of-state tuition money from those students coming in from out of state thinking they won't practice in CO. We wouldn't want to lose their absurdly high tuition dollars...
While I agree with previous posts, one thing is interesting. We pass the bar at a 90% clip. This has been consistent over the years. Schools that teach primarily towards passing the bar (even more then DU) still have extremely low pass rates for their respective bars.
So when it is school with a high-baseline for the student body, do the professors simply assume that they can teach they way they want and we will end up busting our asses in barbri to pass because at that point it is our livelihood at stake? Am I missing some other variable here?
This seems wrong. We are smart, so the faculty assumes we can pass the bar regardless of how we are taught during our four years of law school?
I'm not opposed to how law school is taught at CU. My way of thinking has certainly changed, and I would be opposed to a more Colorado law-based approach. However, this year has been a total wash as far as teaching me to "think like a lawyer." I'll learn as much from two weeks of work on a specific subject as I would from a semester-long course.
I think law school should 1) teach you how to think like a lawyer; 2) write like a lawyer; 3) provide some semblance of the logistics of practice and then be done. The third year is worthless, as far as I'm concerned. We know the game and how to play. We realize that we can do virtually no work for the first two months, cram for 2-3 weeks and come away with whatever grades we normally get.
I have to disagree with a lot of what has been posted here. I think that a bunch of courses that are designed to help one pass the bar would be, as a anonymous poster pointed out, incredibly boring. I think that a solution to this might be some kind of free bar review course offered by the school instead of making students pay 2k for the privilege.
However, while I think that traditional legal education is valuable I agree with Boulder that the best solution would be 2 yrs of traditional legal education with a mandatory 1 yr externship for the third year to learn the practical skills of lawyering. As a third year I can assure you that I have totally cashed it in and am doing only the bare minimum. I am not getting anything more out of the learning experience.
For those who feel that CU should be teaching more Colorado Law does that mean that you would prefer that your expensive legal education be relevant in only one state? CU should strive to prepare graduates to practice law in any jurisdiction in the country.
If you ever take Bar-Bri, you realize that what they teach you, aside from the black letter law, is how to "game" the test, because a lot of it is strategy and pattern recognition. I think that sort of instruction is inappropriate for the law school classroom because it's useless outside of the testing environment, and also it doesn't provide the kind of refined analysis of the law that you need to "think like a lawyer". Bar-Bri just teaches you how to "think like a bar exam taker".
I don't think the Colorado law versus generic law issue is binary. CU doesn't have to teach one to the exclusion of the other. JQET brought up Huntington's "this class won't get you through the Family Law bar" disclaimer, but Claire should get props for teaching the Colorado marriage and divorce statutes despite her disclaimer. Likewise, Mimi Wesson teaches the Colorado rules of evidence that differ significantly from the federal rules.
If CU doesn't teach Colorado law, what law should it teach? Only a small percentage of lawyers practice in federal court. The ALI Model Rules, Model Penal Code, etc., and all the Restatements are adopted and interpreted on a state-by-state basis. The fact is, there isn't truly any core law that is ubiquitously applied -- even the "generally applicable rules of contract law" are different in CA than CO than NY.
Isn't there room for both "general" and Colorado law at CU? There seems to be in some classrooms, but not others.
Here's the thing: law school, the Colorado Bar, and the actual practice of law in Colorado are not closely related to each other. Even if CU prepared students for the Colorado Bar, that doesn't mean it would prepare them to practice law.
The Colorado Bar is (like most Bars) very strange. It basically tests on the law of nowhere. The Family Law and parts of the Civil Procedure stuff are Colorado specific- that's it. And those are both potential essay topics- this means that you could very well not have a single Colorado-specific issue on the Colorado Bar at all!
Also, as some people have already said, the lectures you suffer through in Barbri and PBMR are incredibly boring. It's about memorizing as much information as you can from the issues that could appear on the Bar.
I agree with NH that Barbri teaches you to think like a test-taker. Anyway, look at our pass rate numbers. CU Law has its problems, but I don't think a lack of Colorado Bar prep is one of them.
Moop
Only a small % of lawyers practice in any court, let alone Colorado or Fed. Out of curiosity, can some of the graduates out there tell us what you actually use in practice? Most of the posters here have had limited exposer to "real lawyering," so some bona fide opinions would be fantastico.
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