For those of you who think there aren’t enough law grads licensed to practice in Minnesota — never fear! The Minnesota Supreme Court is poised to take care of that problem for you.
The state high court is considering the petition of a handful of grads from non-American Bar Association accredited law schools who want to be able to take the Minnesota bar exam. (Currently, only graduates of ABA-accredited schools can sit for the state’s bar exam). Perhaps anticipating that the idea of adding more Minnesota lawyers might engender some controversy, the high court asked the Board of Law Examiners to study the matter. The board has scheduled two public hearings – one to be held in Duluth on March 16 and one to be held in St. Paul on March 30. (Click here for details.)
Before folks get too much in a frenzy, I should point out that the petition only seeks this right for lawyers who are already licensed in another U.S. jurisdiction. So, unless Minnesota winters get a lot warmer or lawyer jobs much more plentiful, I don’t suspect there will be a mass migration of non-ABA accredited grads to Minnesota if the court should decide to loosen the bar exam rule a bit. Still, it’s interesting that this comes up at a time when there isn’t enough work to go around for the lawyers who are already licensed here.
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Opening up the admissions process to lawyers who have attended unaccredited law schools but have been successfully admitted in other states is not so much about increasing the number of lawyers but about alternative methods of providing legal education. Although I have not been impressed by the programs provided by the few unaccredited schools I have looked at, real competition with ABA accredited schools may be lacking because the market for alternative schools is so limited. As a result, some hard questions about legal education are not being addressed: is it necessary for every school to have a multi-million dollar library? Should faculty devote less time to scholarship and teach more classes? Is the high cost of law school an access to justice issue for poor and middle class Americans?
On the other hand, we need to figure out whether the passage of another state’s bar exam is sufficient to ensure competency where the unaccredited law school itself may have been lacking (one such school does not require a 4-year undergraduate degree). These are tough questions and it is good to see that the Board of Law Examiners is trying to collect as much information as possible (NB: BLE, not the Supreme Court, is conducting the hearings).
Thanks Eric — I fixed the BLE reference. I agree with some of the sentiments you express here regarding the criteria the ABA uses to determine whether a law school should be accredited. The size of a law library strikes me as one particularly poor indicator in this computer-driven age (and one that keeps the price of tuition high).
The issue with there being too many law grads is actually a two-fold problem. Not finding a well-paying job takes on tragic proportions when you look at the debt loads grads are carrying. If a good inexpensive way to get a law degree existed, maybe there would be more folks who could take the cases of folks who need lawyers, but don’t have much for the legal fees.
Minnesota is struggling with an over-saturation of young lawyers.
Whether this is a temporary problem associated with the current economy or a structural problem associated with too many local law schools is a question for a different time.
I think it’s a perfectly good idea to allow more people to take the Bar Exam if it’s coupled with an increase in the Bar Exam score required for passage in Minnesota.
If we bumped the passing score from 60% (a “D” grade in most schools) up to 75% or 80%, I would have no problem then broadening the base of who is allowed to sit for the exam.
This is a BIT off topic, but one of the odder aspects of our bar admission process is that a person who scores a 145 or higher on the MBE in another jurisdiction can “waive in” here without sitting for the MPT/essay portion of the exam.
The median score on the July 2009 MBE, nationally, was 145.
Maybe it’s just me, but why do we let 50% of the freshly minted lawyers, nationally, practice in Minnesota without the additional burden of coming here and taking the exam at all?
I see from the NCBEX’s statistics that only a couple of hundred lawyers are seeking admission by motion here every year. And I’m not sure how many of those are folks who are using their MBE scores to get in. But those numbers seem more significant to me than the handful who may seek admission from non-ABA law schools.
And anyways, why sit for the bar in Minnesota? Sit for it in Wisconsin, and then get two admissions for for a single exam. The MBE isn’t fun, but scoring over 145 is apparently so easy that 50% of all examinees manage to do so. So why not study hard for the MBE and enhance that résumé with an extra admission?
(Reference: http://www.ncbex.org/fileadmin/mediafiles/downloads/Bar_Admissions/2009_Stats.pdf)
^^ That’s exactly what I’m doing … sitting for IL, because of the weird 145-waive-in thing that MN’s got.