The Texas Supreme Court had already weighed in on the COVID exam question, resolving to offer an online option and a hotel-based in-person exam that one tipster branded a second-rate NBA bubble. But online tests have proven disastrous thus far and in-person exams are still death traps. That prompted Justice Eva Guzman to advocate an apprenticeship path to admission and offered applicants a brief moment of hope.
In an August 24 letter to the Texas Board of Law Examiners obtained by Bar Exam Tracker, Justice Guzman informs the Board that she would like to see apprenticeship added to its next set of recommendations to the state supreme court.
Noting that online bar exam efforts carry “an unacceptable degree of uncertainty,” Justice Guzman brands an examless apprenticeship option “prudent, if not essential.”
Without a doubt, some test-takers are disproportionately affected by COVID-19 and related issues, and for them, an in-person hotel exam or an online exam are not genuinely viable alternatives. For this group, these difficult times demand another licensing option. As the statistics show, the overwhelming majority of bar examinees eventually pass the bar This year’s bar applicants have been studying just as much as those in years past, if not more. Under the extant circumstances, the risk of licensing applicants who might not have passed the exam in an ordinary year is tolerable.
An excellent point! That’s not to say that apprenticeship-style licensing won’t present challenges. It’s hard enough to get jobs right now without making it a prerequisite to a license. And it obviously introduces another imbalanced power relationship in a profession fraught with them. But these are the sorts of challenges that we should set our licensing experts to solving. Joshua Lenon of Clio proposed an expanded role for law schools taking on graduates to do important work bridging the access to justice gap. That’s the sort of creative thinking states should be getting into.
And yet the court explicitly rejected this suggestion a mere four days later with Justice Busby citing budget concerns at the State Bar and Board of Law Examiners. A corkscrew worthy of Six Flags![1] Observers noted that back in July, there were five justices already on some form of diploma privilege or apprenticeship path and that wasn’t even including Justice Guzman. How the court got from that number plus the addition of Justice Guzman to a curt rejection of the possibility in less than a week is a mystery. Have we really gotten to the point where making licensing authorities put in a little hard work is a dealbreaker?
We’ve come a long way from some very famous words uttered in Texas back when we did things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
[1] By the way, shouldn’t more people be asking why we’ve got theme parks celebrating all of those flags? Because one of the six is… problematic.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.