Description
Book SynopsisThe comprehensive source on attorney licensing and how to reform it.
In Shaping the Bar, Joan Howarth describes how the twin gatekeepers of the legal profession—law schools and licensers—are failing the public. Attorney licensing should be laser-focused on readiness to practice law with the minimum competence of a new attorney. According to Howarth, requirements today are both too difficult and too easy. Amid the crisis in unmet legal services, record numbers of law school graduates—disproportionately people of color—are failing bar exams that are not meaningful tests of competence to practice. At the same time, after seven years of higher education, hundreds of thousands of dollars of law school debt, two months of cramming legal rules, and success on a bar exam, a candidate can be licensed to practice law without ever having been in a law office or even seen a lawyer with a client.
Howarth makes the case that the licensing rituals familiar to generations of lawyers—unfocused law degrees and obsolete bar exams—are protecting members of the profession more than the public. Beyond explaining the failures of the current system, this book presents the latest research on competent lawyering and examples of better approaches. This book presents the path forward by means of licensing changes to protect the public while building an inclusive, diverse, competent, ethical profession.
Thoughtful and engaging, Shaping the Bar is both an authoritative account of attorney licensing and a pragmatic handbook for overdue equitable reform of a powerful profession.
Trade Review"Howarth's vision is to establish a new approach that protects potential legal clients and promotes inclusion and diversity in the profession."—
Trial MagazineTable of Contents1. The Crisis in Attorney Licensing
2. Becoming a Lawyer in the Young Nation
3. Shaping the Bar in the Twentieth Century
4. The 1970s Legacy of Activism, Psychometrics, and Good Faith
5. Pressure Points in Contemporary Licensing
6. Decades Lost Without Research
7. Doubling Down on the Errors of Legal Education
8. Finally, Research on Minimum Competence
9. Who Fits?
10. Fixing Character and Fitness
11. Twelve Guiding Principles
12. Clinical Residencies
13. Asking More of Law Schools
14. Escaping the Conceptual Traps of Today's Bar Exams
15. Bar Exams: Better, Best, and Other Fixes
