New York’s Next Bar Exam: Where Should We Go From Here?
9.16.2024
It’s been 10 years since New York faced the question of whether to adopt the Uniform Bar Exam. New York decided to do so, after much debate and dissent, with positive and negative consequences for law schools, students, the public and the practicing bar in New York. Now the question is whether to adopt the NextGen Bar Exam or consider other options, as have California and Nevada. But time is of the essence, because the Uniform Bar Exam, commonly referred to as the UBE, sunsets in February 2028, and putting a new bar exam in place for July 2028 takes planning and time. There is no fallback position, as the UBE’s components will no longer be available after the February examination.
Since COVID, there is no aspect of the legal profession that has not been affected: the market for legal services, the competitive pressures within and outside the profession, and the rise of AI technologies in the classroom, the law office, and the courtroom. Many of COVID’s changes will be long-lasting and remain part of how we live, learn, and work. This includes the bar exam. During the height of the pandemic, jurisdictions, including New York, had to consider alternatives to the traditional delivery system for the bar exam. Many advocated for an emergency diploma privilege solely on the basis of graduation from an ABA-accredited law school. New York, however, remained firm in its commitment to an examination for law licensure and administered an abbreviated, online bar exam in October 2020 provided by the National Conference of Bar Examiners to jurisdictions for this purpose.
During this difficult time, the conference was developing the NextGen Bar Exam which makes its debut in July 2026. Likewise, the New York State Bar Association Task Force On The New York Bar Examination, which had been formed in 2019, was evaluating reforms to the bar exam and alternative pathways to bar admission, issuing three comprehensive reports between 2020 and 2021.[1] Its recommendations have yet to be acted upon in large measure by the Court of Appeals, but once again, New York must make a critical decision affecting future generations of New York lawyers.
What Lies Ahead
New York is not alone in determining its next pathway for licensure. Not only is it joined by jurisdictions across the country, but the bar exam itself is having nothing short of a renaissance moment.[2] In writing about the groundswell of activity concerning the bar exam, journalist Julianne Hill asked, “Is this a key moment for the bar exam?”[3] While the bar exam has always been something of a lightning rod when it comes to criticism and blame, the attention it has garnered this past year is far from business as usual:
- In March, the Supreme Court of Washington issued orders approving alternative pathways for law licensure where admission no longer requires some form of bar exam for the first time.[4]
- In May, Oregon’s Supreme Court approved two alternative licensing pathways for graduates to be licensed in Oregon without taking the bar exam.[5]
- In May, the ABA’s section on legal education issued a policy statement that deviated from a 103-year-old policy to recognize “diverse pathways to licensure.”[6]
- In July, California’s state bar board of trustees “authorized officials to finalize and execute a $8.25 million, five-year contract with Kaplan Test Prep to develop bar exam questions” for California’s own bar exam.[7] California is second only to New York in its number of bar exam test takers.
- In July, the Nevada State Supreme Court[8] invited public comment on its three-pronged plan for attorney licensing: a Foundational Law Examination, a Nevada Lawyering Performance Examination, and a Supervised Practice Program.[9]
- In July, the Supreme Court of Arizona ordered the start of the Arizona Lawyer Apprentice Program providing a pathway to licensure for those with UBE scores between 260 and 269, one point shy of Arizona’s cut score.[10] The program will also help increase “the number of lawyers available to serve the public in rural communities and in public law offices – like prosecution and defense agencies.”[11]
It’s time for New York to decide the path forward. New York has options and opportunities, and while it seems that every day another jurisdiction has joined the NextGen movement, this is far from an inevitable choice,[12] or even the right one. That is yet to be determined.
Decisions require knowledge. Knowing the content and policies behind New York’s prior and current bar exams, as well as what we’ve learned from administering them, is essential to making an informed decision.
This article begins with the basic inquiry of whether New York’s current bar exam, a combination of the UBE and New York Law Exam, measures minimum competency for commencing the practice of law in New York. We begin here because all questions regarding licensing exams are driven by this basic determination.
Equally relevant and closely related issues will be addressed in subsequent Journal forums, including:
- UBE’s promise of portability: Where was it when New York needed it most?
The UBE’s key selling point was its score portability. However, when COVID made it impossible to seat most of New York’s candidates for the 2020 bar exam, they were encouraged to sit for the bar exam at another UBE jurisdiction and transfer the score back to New York. Instead of finding a place to take the exam in another UBE jurisdiction, most candidates found the doors slammed shut.
- UBE jurisdictions’ bar pass cut scores: Should they be moving targets?
Jurisdictions set their own cut scores which range from 270 to 260 and they may change those scores at will. What happens to the concept of competency both within and between jurisdictions, when a jurisdiction cuts its pass score: does it mean that candidates who were deemed not minimally competent to practice in that jurisdiction are now competent when the cut score is lowered?
- Does New York benefit from the UBE’s portability?
The portability benefit to New York is uncertain. The overwhelming majority of New York UBE holders do not transfer their scores, while those who do most likely maintain their New York law license as well.
- Do the NYLE and the NextGen bar exam perpetuate performance differences based on race and gender when they use only multiple-choice questions (NYLE) or no essays (NextGen)?
Numerous studies find gender differences in performance on multiple-choice and essay exams, and the National Conference of Bar Examiners’ study on the impact of adoption of the UBE in New York confirmed these findings. According to the study, males outperform females on multiple-choice exams while females lead on the written portion.
It is important to keep in mind that the purpose of a bar examination is to determine whether the law school graduate has mastered the legal skills and general knowledge that a first-year practicing attorney should have. This means a firm grasp of black letter law and a solid grounding in the basic analytical, reading, and writing skills. Writing a well-constructed legal essay is a learned skill that requires mastery of the law and the nature of logical argument.
A licensing process that fails to assess the candidate’s ability to write, analyze, and reason logically about the law of the licensing state would be inadequate to achieve its objective. This is what a licensing exam for the practice of law must be designed to do. When a candidate has mastered the basic skills of legal analysis and how to learn the law, then the bar exam is not a barrier to the profession but a threshold requirement for entering the profession to be met like any other.
The New York Law Exam: A Promise Unfulfilled?
In addition to a passing score on the UBE, a candidate seeking admission in New York must take the online New York Law Course and pass the New York Law Exam, an online, open book, 50 multiple-choice question test.[13]
Since the adoption of the New York Law Exam in 2016, there is troubling evidence that New York law schools have adjusted their curriculums to teach general principles of law tested on the UBE, not New York law; enrollment in New York Civil Practice courses has dropped compared with the time when generations of students in New York law schools took this course; and bar review courses no longer include coverage of New York law or civil practice as part of their standard bar preparation courses.
| New York Law Course | New York Law Exam |
| Recorded lectures on 12 subjects tested on NYLE: New York Court System, Administrative Law, Business Relationships (Business Corporations, LLCs, and Partnerships), Civil Practice and Procedure, Conflict of Laws, Contracts, Criminal Law and Procedure, Evidence, Matrimonial and Family Law, Professional Responsibility, Real Property, Torts and Tort Damages, and Trusts, Wills and Estates. | Must complete NYLC before registering for NYLE.
The course is offered three times a year. |
| Candidates must answer embedded questions in each lecture. | Open-book, two-hour, online exam. |
| Course materials on board’s website; all NYLE questions based on these materials and can be answered by reference to them. | Passing is 60% (30 out of 50 questions). |
| 206 pages of course materials updated as of October 2021. | Candidate who fails the NYLE must retake the NYLC and the NYLE. |
| NYLC/NYLE course materials are locked in a non-searchable format prohibiting candidates from electronically searching the materials when taking the NYLE. |
Promises and Presumptions Made About the ‘New’ New York Bar Exam
When Court of Appeals Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman announced in 2015 that the state would adopt the two-day Uniform Bar Exam, he also declared that the “New York Day”[14] of the bar exam would be eliminated and replaced with a separate test of New York law that he promised would be “thorough” and “rigorous,” provide “comprehensive testing of knowledge of New York law,” and preserve New York’s reputation among state bars as the “gold standard” for bar admission.[15]
The court’s Advisory Committee on the Uniform Bar Exam, which had spearheaded a statewide effort to gather comments from members of the bar, bench, and legal academy about the court’s plan to revise the bar exam, reported to Judge Lippman that a “recurring theme at nearly every public hearing” was concern about the potential negative effects on both the teaching and study of New York law once the bar exam no longer included the New York Day essay questions.[16] Commenters argued that in the absence of such essay questions, the exam would not test examinees’ ability to spot and analyze the state law issues they might encounter when asked to solve the problems of their New York clients, nor would it assess whether they could clearly and accurately describe in writing the solutions to those problems. The advisory committee dismissed these widespread concerns, explaining that because many New York law students “have an interest in practicing in New York,” the law schools located in New York “will have an incentive to continue teaching New York law” and will “presumably prepare students for the separate New York online test.”[17]
At the recommendation of the advisory committee, the court implemented another unprecedented change to the way lawyers in New York are trained and tested. The court directed the Board of Law Examiners not only to continue to write, give and grade the bar exam, a role for which it has developed substantial expertise over many decades, but also to assume the entirely new responsibility for designing and delivering a series of online video lectures in New York law that applicants must complete to register for the New York Law Examination. This change instantly transformed the Board of Law Examiners from a testing agency into a provider of legal education for more than 10,000 bar applicants annually.
Noting that this new approach was unique and untested, the advisory committee nevertheless declared that the mandatory New York Law Course was “pedagogically sound.” The committee proclaimed this to be so whether or not the examinee had taken any courses in law school that covered New York law, attended a law school outside the state, or obtained their first degrees in law in a foreign country.[18] Although the advisory committee understood that the identical New York Law Course would be offered to all bar applicants regardless of their background in New York law, the committee deemed the course to be adequate preparation for New York practice as “a helpful refresher for those who studied New York law in law school and a suitable introduction for those who did not.”[19]
Wisely, the advisory committee recommended that this new and unique approach to testing be subjected to a disparate impact analysis after three years and, if an adverse disparate impact were discovered, the court “should consider terminating use of the Uniform Bar Examination.”[20] The disparate impact study, which was completed in 2019, did not, however, examine the new exam protocol’s impact on the ability of newly admitted lawyers to understand and apply New York law or on students’ opportunities to access adequate instruction in New York law.
A careful and thorough study conducted under court auspices would be the preferred way to fill this surprising gap in the analysis of the New York bar exam’s disparate impact. However, by reviewing certain public sources of information about what law schools now teach and what students now study concerning New York law, this article attempts to flag the pressing need for such a court-sponsored study by highlighting disturbing evidence that the advisory committee’s presumptions about law schools’ incentives to teach New York law were inaccurate, the “recurring” concerns about new attorney competence in New York law have proven to be well-founded, and the promise of a “gold standard” for admission to the New York bar has not been kept.
What Bar Applicants Say About the New York Law Examination
Remarks from bar applicants who have taken the New York Law Examination provide useful insights into the examination’s impact on how applicants study New York law to prepare for the exam. Reddit, for example, has numerous threads that offer candid advice from students about how to study for and pass the New York Law Examination.[21] Many indicate that a few days of study immediately preceding the exam are sufficient to pass the exam. Typical was this comment from one Reddit user: “I tabbed it [the law outline] two days before the exam, and then read through it fully that day and the day of the exam. That’s it and it was enough to pass.”
Another Reddit user commented, “If you skim the outline and tab it for reference, it is incredibly easy. It’s basically a test of ‘can you find the answer when you have the outline.'” Comments such as these highlight the impact of the New York Law Examination’s open-book, multiple choice format, which permits test-takers to locate the right answers by looking up the applicable law in the very readable, well-organized outline of tested law that the Board of Law Examiners posts on its website. As one Reddit user noted, “The most important thing to do to prepare for the New York Law Examination is to tab the Board of Law Examiners law outline; no need to learn the law contained in the course or the outline just learn where to find it in the outline because the exam is open book.”
This premium on the ability to quickly locate information in the Board of Law Examiners outline, rather than on acquiring a solid understanding of the law summarized in the outline, has led to a widespread perception that the New York Law Examination is more of a gatekeeping procedural hurdle to bar admission than a substantive assessment of competence to practice in New York.[22] Some have compared the difficulty of the New York Law Examination to that of the New York driver’s license test.[23] The passing grade on the New York Law Examination, which is 30 correct answers out of 50 multiple-choice questions (or 60%), reinforces the view that the exam lacks rigor. As one commenter on Reddit put it, “You can get a lot wrong and still pass.” None of the dozen or so Reddit threads reviewed encouraged students to take a law school course in New York law or procedure to improve their chances of passing the New York Law Examination.
Comments about the New York Law Course indicate that students do not treat the obligation to complete the course with any greater seriousness than the New York Law Examination itself. One Reddit user commented, “I did not pay attention during most of the videos and did fine.” Another reported, “The actually [sic] course is really dumb and doesn’t even match the outline sometimes (but the test does). Just run it in the background while you are doing other things.”
This perception of the very limited time and effort required to study for and pass the New York Law Examination naturally affects the incentives for law schools to teach courses that feature New York law and for law students to allocate their limited elective credits to courses in New York law. As the New York State Bar Association Task Force on the New York Bar Examination noted, “Law schools are not going to offer more New York courses unless students are incentivized to, and do, take them. The task force, which includes members who are or have been full-time law faculty, recognize the fact that law schools in general are not going to offer courses that students are not taking; law schools are not going to hire and compensate faculty to teach courses that students are not taking.”[24]
There is little incentive for a law student to take a semester-long course because it offers a substantial New York law component if the student can pass the New York Law Examination with a few days of focused preparation that includes a sufficient measure of careful tabbing in the Board of Law Examiners outline.
What Law Schools Tell Students About Studying New York Law
New York law does not have a prominent place in law schools’ public pronouncements to students about the courses the schools offer or the subjects students are advised to study.
A random sampling of websites at four New York law schools (public and private, upstate and downstate, top tier and below) reveals a limited focus on New York-specific law in the curriculum.[25] Most of the schools include in their course catalogues only one or two courses that reflect in their titles a focus on New York State law. Only a handful mention New York law in their course description. When the school does offer a course in New York law, the course is not listed as part of the core curriculum or coursework required for graduation.
Experiential courses may offer students exposure to state law, especially in clinics serving actual clients in communities where a New York law school is located. Students must complete six credits in courses of this kind so that the law school can satisfy ABA accreditation standards. Each law school examined for this article offers an impressive array of experiential learning opportunities via clinics, simulations, practicums and field placements. Even so, few of the course catalogue descriptions for these experiential learning courses feature training in New York law as part of their stated objectives or learning outcomes, and few make a course in New York law or procedure a prerequisite for enrollment. Because students may satisfy experiential learning requirements through simulation courses or clinics that focus on federal law, such as immigration or securities regulation, simply requiring law students to satisfy experiential learning requirements does not ensure training in New York law or procedure across the student body as a whole, even at a law school located in New York.
The limited integration of New York law into the law school curriculum is also evident in the schools’ designs of suggested study concentrations, curriculum maps, or course pathways that students are advised to follow to become practice-ready generally or to prepare for practice in a particular area of the law. While these concentrations, maps and pathways are thoughtfully designed to assist students in preparing for careers in, for example, business law, litigation, intellectual property law, or tort law, they do not typically recommend that students take courses in New York-specific law related to that particular concentration. For example, one school’s litigation concentration recommends that a student take courses in evidence or trial advocacy as part of the pathway but does not recommend a course in New York civil procedure, even for students who plan to become litigators in New York. Notably, none of the concentrations or career pathways reviewed for this article was designed expressly for a New York practitioner, such as “the New York litigator pathway” or “the New York real estate concentration,” despite the fact that the majority of the law students in each school, sometimes nearly all of them, obtain post-graduate jobs in New York according to the employment data published on the schools’ websites.
In light of the law schools’ failure to encourage the study of New York law by systematically including it in the content of the courses they offer or emphasizing its importance for aspiring New York lawyers, it is not surprising that enrollment in New York law related courses is low. In a 2018 letter to Chief Judge Janet DiFiore, the NYSBA Committee on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar described an exponential decline in enrollment in New York civil practice courses at most New York law schools. For example, at the three schools that saw the steepest decline, enrollment figures for the 2014-15 academic year, before the adoption of the Uniform Bar Examination, compared to the 2017-2018 academic year were: Eg Cardozo Law School (2014 enrollment: 170; 2017 enrollment: 14), New York Law School (2014: 330; 2017: 21), and St. John’s Law School (2014: 218; 2017: 24).[26] In 2019, the NYSBA task force surveyed law graduates seeking admission to the bar in New York and found that almost half of the responders reported that their law school did not offer a course focused exclusively on New York law, such as New York civil practice. Where law schools offered a New York specific course, almost three quarters of responders stated “that they chose not to take the course.”[27], [28]
Who Is Training Applicants for Bar Admission in New York Law?
Commercial bar preparation courses have always played a large role in preparing candidates for the New York bar exam. According to the advisory committee, the majority of applicants to the New York bar are trained at law schools outside of New York and many, if not most of them, learned the differences in New York law from commercial bar preparation courses when studying for the New York Day of the exam.[29]
Before the adoption of the UBE, these commercial bar preparation courses provided extensive training in New York law distinctions and New York procedure to prepare examinees for the New York Day of the bar examination. Since the adoption of the UBE, however, they no longer appear to perform that role. A review of the current websites of major providers like BARBRI, Themis, and Pieper indicates that New York law is not mentioned as one of the subjects covered in any of their standard bar preparation courses.[30] Because the UBE questions are necessarily based on sources of laws and rules that are not state-specific, such as law restatements and uniform codes which New York has not adopted, it only makes sense for a commercial bar preparation course to confine their instruction to the so-called “uniform laws” tested on the UBE. Apparently, preparing students for the separate New York Law Examination is not a commercially viable service to offer, which no doubt reflects the attitude among bar applicants that the New York Law Examination can be passed without a substantial investment of time or resources.
Without intending to do so, the Court of Appeals has made the New York Law Course the most important source of bar applicants’ formal, “classroom” training in New York-specific law and turned the Board of Law Examiners into the paramount provider of education in the fundamentals of New York law for newly admitted New York lawyers. Although the New York Law Course is not publicly available because it cannot be accessed without registering for the bar exam, simple common sense dictates that no matter how well done its videos are, the New York Law Course cannot provide a pedagogically sound substitute for formal training in New York law. Unlike a law school course, or even a commercial bar preparation course, where a student can communicate in person or by email with the instructor about questions or areas of confusion, the New York Law Course does not offer the opportunity for personalized feedback from its video lecturers or the Board of Law Examiners.
What Is the Path Forward?
The Court of Appeals and the Board of Law Examiners will be forced to implement a new bar exam no later than July 2028, when the National Conference of Bar Examiners plans to stop offering the Uniform Bar Examination and replace it with the NextGen exam. According to the National Conference of Bar Examiners, the NextGen exam will shift its orientation from a test largely focused on memorized rules of substantive law to a test mostly of lawyering skills. In connection with meeting the July 2028 deadline, the court has the opportunity now to commission a careful study of the New York Law Examination/New York Law Course with a view toward correcting what hindsight shows are the unintended, negative consequences of the state’s eight-year experiment with the Uniform Bar Examination/New York Law Examination protocol.
Embrace the Opportunity and Fulfill the Promise
The Court of Appeals’ dual interests in protecting the public from incompetent lawyers and ensuring equal access to the profession require that the New York Law Examination be re-evaluated and reformed. By doing so, the court can make good its promise that New York stands as the gold standard for bar admission in the U.S.
For further information and background on this topic, see the report of the NYSBA Task Force on the New York Bar Examination and look for more articles in upcoming issues of the NYSBA Journal.[31]
David R. Marshall co-chairs with Professor Darrow-Kleinhaus the Committee on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar. He is an adjunct professor and co-director of the Center for Labor and Employment Law at St. John’s University School of Law. He began his career at the National Labor Relations Board in Washington, D.C., before entering private practice in New York City, where he practiced labor and employment law for nearly four decades.
Suzanne Darrow-Kleinhaus is a professor of law at Touro University, Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center, where she teaches contracts and sales. As the former director of academic development and bar programs for over 20 years, she coordinated, directed, and implemented all aspects of Touro’s academic support and bar programs. She has written extensively on the bar examination, including “The Bar Exam in a Nutshell,” “Acing the Bar Exam,” and “The New York Bar Exam by the Issues,” among others.
Endnotes
[1] See Report of the New York State Bar Association Task Force on the New York State Bar Examination, March 5, 2020, https://nysba.org/app/uploads/2020/04/Report-of-the-NYSBA-Task-Force-on-the-New-York-Bar-Examination-amendment-1.pdf); Report of the New York State Bar Association Task Force on the New York State Bar Examination, March 30, 2020, https://nysba.org/app/uploads/2020/03/Second-Report-of-the-Task-Force-on-the-New-York-Bar-Examination-April-2020.pdf); Report of the New York State Bar Association Task Force on the New York State Bar Examination, June 2021, https://nysba.org/app/uploads/2021/03/Task-Force-on-the-New-York-Bar-Examination-FINAL-approved-June-12-2021.pdf.
[2] Richard Trachok, “Attorney licensing is undergoing a reevaluation nationwide. I would say the impetus was the pandemic and what we have learned about professional licensing testing.” The Nevada Plan – Nevada’s Comprehensive Licensing Examination, Nevada Lawyer, August 2024, https://nvbar.org/wp-content/uploads/NevadaLawyer_Aug2024_NevadaLicensingPlan.pdf.
[3] Julianne Hill, Is This a Key Moment for the Bar Exam, July 25, 2025, www.abajournal.com/Authors/64808/.
[4] Among other changes, the court’s orders implemented these changes: adopting NextGen beginning in July 2026 and creating ‘three experiential-learning alternatives to the bar exam, one for law-school graduates, one for law-school students, and one for APR 6 law clerks (who are enrolled in a non-law school course of study).” Washington Courts: Press Release Detail Supreme Court Approves Alternative Pathways to Lawyer Licensure in Washington State March 15, 2024. https://www.courts.wa.gov/newsinfo/?fa=newsinfo.pressdetail&newsid=50389 (last visited August 2, 2024).
[5] Karen Sloan, Reuters, No Bar Exam Required To Practice Law in Oregon Starting Next Year, Nov. 7, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/no-bar-exam-required-practice-law-oregon-starting-next-year-2023-11-07/.
[6] ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, General News, May 2024, Summary of actions of the section’s Council at its public meeting of May 17, 2024. The alternate pathways are to be considered only by ABA-accredited law schools. https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/council_reports_and_resolutions/may24/24-may-legal-ed-council-meeting-summary.pdf
[7] Karen Sloan, California Forges Ahead With Plan To Give Its Own Bar Exam in 2025, July, 19, 2024, Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/california-forges-ahead-with-plan-give-its-own-bar-exam-2025-2024-07-19/.
[8] State Bar of Nevada, Comments Invited by Aug. 16 Re: Administration of Nevada Bar Exam, https://nvbar.org/hearing-scheduled-for-aug-8-re-administration-of-nevada-bar-exam/. See also Richard Trachok, The Nevada Plan – Nevada’s Comprehensive Licensing Examination, Nevada Lawyer, August 2024, https://nvbar.org/wcontent/uploads/NevadaLawyer_Aug2024_NevadaLicensingPlan.pdf
[9] David Faigman and Richard Trachok, The Nevada Bar Exam Study: Findings, Nevada Lawyer, p. 30, July 2023.
[10] Arizona Supreme Court, Administrative Office of the Courts, News Release, July 17, 2024, https://www.azcourts.gov/Portals/201/News%20Release%20-%20Arizona%20Supreme%20Court%20Authorizes%20Lawyer%20Apprentice%20Program.pdf. (last visited August 2, 2024).
[11] Arizona Judicial Branch, Certification and Licensing, ALAP Arizona Lawyer Apprentice Program, https://www.azcourts.gov/cld/Arizona-Lawyer-Apprentice-Program (last visited August 2, 2024).
[12] Nachman N. Gutowski, Ashley London, Taylor Ruth Israel, and Steven Foster, Questioning the Inevitability of the NextGen Gar Examination: A White Paper, July 25, 2024.
[13] The Board of Law Examiners website provides the information about the New York Law Course and New York Law Exam summarized in the accompanying chart (available at www.nybarexam.org).
[14] Before the adoption of the Uniform Bar Examination and New York Law Examination in 2016, the first day of the two-day New York bar exam consisted of: (i) five essays testing knowledge and application of New York legal principles, procedure and ethics, (ii) 50 multiple choice questions on New York-specific rules, and (iii) a performance test that required examinees to use a file of law and documents to perform a task, such as drafting a complaint, legal memorandum, or client letter. See Report and Recommendation of the Task Force on the Bar Examination, New York State Bar Association, June 2021, pp. 8, 9 (“Task Force Report”).
[15] Jonathan Lippman, Chief Judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, Law Day 2015 Address (May 5, 2015) (transcript available at https/www.nycourts.gov/ctapps/news/LawDay2015.pdf).
[16] Advisory Committee on the Uniform Bar Examination, Ensuring Standards and Increasing Opportunities for the Next Generation of New York Attorneys, Final Report to Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman and to the Court Of Appeals, April 2015, p. 44 (“Advisory Committee Final Report”).
[17] Advisory Committee Final Report, pp. 49-50.
[18] Advisory Committee Final Report, p. 47.
[19] Advisory Committee Final Report, p. 47.
[20] Advisory Committee Final Report, p. 62.
[21] Reddit threads quoted herein are on file with author.
[22] The New York State Bar Association Task Force on the New York Bar Examination observed that “the New York Law Examination is widely disparaged by applicants and is viewed as a mere speed bump on the road to admission. This general sentiment was expressed by law school deans, professors, and students. Applicants themselves have shared these sentiments with Task Force members at Character and Fitness interviews. Moreover, the Task Force’s student survey found that fewer than a quarter of the students surveyed thought that the New York Law Examination was challenging.” Task Force Report, p. 82.
[23] Advisory Committee Final Report, Appendix 2, Letter from Jonathan Gardiner Pieper to Chief Judge Lippman.
[24] Task Force Report, p. 86.
[25] The law schools that were the subject of this random and admittedly unscientific website review are not identified here and citations to their websites are not provided because it is not the intention of this article to single out particular schools for scrutiny or criticism. The curriculum design choices law schools make are no doubt the product of a myriad of factors, only one of which is preparing students to pass the bar exam. The point here is that sampling even a handful of websites, which any reader can easily do with a simple browser search, casts genuine doubt on the advisory committee’s presumption in 2015 that adopting the Uniform Bar Examination/New York Law Examination would have no adverse impact on what law schools teach and what law students study in New York law schools.
[26] The June 29, 2018, letter to Chief Judge DiFiore is available at https:/nysba.org. https://nysba.org/app/uploads/2020/02/NY-Practice-Enrollment-06-29-2018.pdf.
[27] “After the Uniform Bar Examination was adopted, all of the bar review courses stopped teaching New York Practice and New York distinctions in other substantive law subjects.” Task Force Report. p. 25.
[28] Task Force Report, p. 28.
[29] Advisory Committee Final Report, p. 50 n.38.
[30] “After the Uniform Bar Examination was adopted, all of the bar review courses stopped teaching New York Practice and New York distinctions in other substantive law subjects.” Task Force Report. p. 25.
[31] New York State Bar Association Task Force on the New York Bar Examination, Third Report and Recommendations of the Task Force on the New York Bar Examination, NYSBA, June 2021, https://nysba.org/app/uploads/2021/03/Task-Force-on-the-New-York-Bar-Examination-FINAL-approved-June-12-2021.pdf.
