Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Mandate Bar Courses? or Bar/Bri?

Should law schools mandate taking so-called bar courses; i.e., courses covering the subject matter of major sections of the bar exam? From the Law Blog:

Douglas Rush, assistant dean at St. Louis Law, has co-written a paper scheduled for publication in the upcoming Journal of Legal Education entitled “Does Law School Curriculum Affect Bar Examination Passage?” The authors documented every student’s courseload for five different graduating classes at St. Louis Law, analyzing the number of bar topic courses taken against bar passage rates for first-time takers. There was virtually no correlation between law school courseloads and the bar passage rates.

This hardly surprises us, in part because of bar-review companies such as Bar/Bri.

Indeed, when I took the DC bar, there were a number of essays on subjects I hadn;t taken in law school, such as Commercial Paper, Wills and Trusts, and Family Law. Bar/Bri did a sufficiently good job of getting me up to speed on such topics that I passed the exam. Conversely, as I recall it, the question on Conflict of Laws wasn’t covered by my law school course of the same name. So I’m not at all sure that mandating bar courses will help bar passage rates. Instead, law schools worried about their students’ bar passage rates might do better to offer Bar/Bri, PMBR or whoever scholarships for students at risk (or graduates who failed the first time around).