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What up, y'all?
It's your boy, Kev On Stage.
I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Best Moment, where I talk to artists athletes entertainers creators friends, people I admire, who've had massive success, about their massive failures.
What did they mess up on?
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And what did they learn from it?
I got judged horribly.
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On an all new episode of iHeartRadio's Las Culturistas, actress and director Brittany Snow opens up about challenging age bias.
Hollywood wants to kind of disregard women after the age of 32.
And she reflects on the responsibility of inspiring other women.
You.
Sharing your story might just be really small to you, but it might be the story that someone needs to feel like there's hope.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Las Culturistas, and listen to the full podcast now.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too.
And this is one of those good old-fashioned rootin' tootin' rooty, fruity episodes of Stuff You Should Know.
Rudy 2D Fresh and Fruity?
That's right.
I forgot the rest of it, but yes, you knew what I was laying down.
Can I shock you right off the bat?
Yes.
I don't think I have ever been in an IHOP restaurant in Eden.
I don't think so.
See, this is normally where I'd be like, what?
Yeah.
But I don't think you're missing enough to warrant a what.
Yeah.
I mean, it was always Waffle House if we were going to do something like that.
So, yeah, never been in an IHOP.
The two are actually not really that comparable, to tell you the truth.
I mean, if you went to a Waffle House and then went to an IHOP, you wouldn't be like been to one, been to the other.
Their menus are different enough.
The vibe's different enough.
Is IHOP more relatable to like a Denny's?
Yes.
Okay.
I've been to Denny's, but not much.
Then you don't need to go to IHOP.
Can we thank the listener who suggested this episode?
Yeah, I remember their email, but I don't remember their name.
Yeah, because I finally actually wrote it down and we're not doing it weeks later.
But this came from listener Rowan.
And I'm not sure how to pronounce this last name, but I'm going to go with Garandasee.
That's a great name.
Garandasee?
I like Garen Daisy more because of the Daisy part.
Yeah.
But Rowan wrote in and I was like, you know what?
I think someone in Rowan's life had taken the bar and I think they realized that they didn't know much about it.
And I was.
Like you know, I've never really thought much about the bar exam and I don't know anything about it.
Well, didn't they also send like a little clip or an anecdote about how crazy it gets during the test?
Like how nuts people will or what nutso lengths they'll go to to finish?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I think I do remember that, actually.
Well, save it.
Save it.
Let's talk about the bar exam, Chuck.
For those people who aren't aware, and from what I can understand, essentially every country in the world that has lawyers has a bar exam.
But it's the test that you have to take in most places to become a practicing attorney, to become licensed as an attorney.
And that's it.
There's bar exam, everybody.
Goodbye.
Yeah, exactly.
And you know the word bar is there because I think it's named after the literal bar railing in a courtroom that divides the public from you know the business end.
Right.
Where you're not really supposed to go past or else a bailiff will jump on you.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
I remember there was a local news story once about a judge who'd been drinking like during work and like they followed him like on his lunch hour and followed him into like a place where he's drinking.
They were like teeing up the story and they said this judge not only passed the bar, he went in and drank at it.
And that, I mean, like I saw that 15 years ago and it stuck with me ever since.
That's so lazy.
It is.
But I mean, I thought it was pretty good to tell you the truth.
Yeah.
Well, that's like when uh, in the old days when we were writers for howstuffworkscom, and like a shining week is when I wrote a clever uh uh, what do you call the thing under the picture?
Caption.
Caption.
Now I can't even remember caption with the word caption.
That's how far we've gone.
Do you remember any good ones?
No, no.
But I was like, hey, Emily, check this out.
I wrote a clever caption.
It was my first professional writing job.
So I was, you know, showing pride.
No, I remember that.
We used to tell one another our great, clever captions.
Yeah, look at this one.
Music lyrics we'd fit into articles that we just thought we were so sly about.
Yeah, and now we just say dumb things with our mouths.
Right.
Well, I feel like we've shaken off all of the curious lawyers who don't normally listen to us, so we can get started everybody.
One of the things about the bar exam I never understood, and I would guess also that most people out there who aren't attorneys or aspiring attorneys wouldn't really get.
But there's a lot of criticism about the bar exam.
It's just not—
It's not just some test that lawyers have to take to get licensed, which on its face sounds great because, like with any professional licensing that protects the public from incompetent lawyers, they have to show that they understand the minimum standard of how to practice law.
That will prevent them from being such a dipstick that their clients are going to get electrocuted because they represented them so poorly.
It's way, way more intricate than that.
Yeah.
Socially speaking, culturally speaking, socioculturally speaking.
Yeah.
Because you don't want to end up with a Lionel Hutz, right?
No.
He almost certainly did not pass the bar.
Well, we'll get to it.
But you don't necessarily have to pass the bar in every state in the United States to practice law.
But sit on it, everybody, because that's coming.
I guess we should go back in time and talk about a little bit of the history, because if you go back to colonial days, pre-states in the United States or not in the United States, but you know what will one day be the United States.
Goodbye, rest of the curious lawyers.
Exactly.
There were no bar exams because there were no law schools.
If you wanted to work as a lawyer, you would apprentice or clerk for a practicing lawyer.
For you know, sometimes you would just do it and donate your time to working for them.
Sometimes you would do that and actually pay them.
Right.
Which, you know, it seems like a pretty good system.
And we'll talk more about apprenticing later, because for my money I think that's a pretty good way to do things.
But by 1750, which is pretty early on, all of the colonies got on board basically, and said all right, we need standards for people to do this job.
And we need to kind of all agree on what that's going to be.
Yeah.
And like a lot of stuff, or most things, with American law.
They were following in the tradition of England, which had had some sort of exam or another for people to become attorneys as far back as the 16th century.
But America wasn't that far behind, you know, a couple hundred years.
Apparently, the first one was Delaware in 1783.
And it was essentially just you would go and hang out with a judge and they would quiz you on some legal stuff.
And if you got it right, you were accepted to the bar.
You were an attorney from that point on.
It was okay for you to practice.
It was also supposedly looked on as very easy, too.
Yeah.
Yeah, I imagine a lot of that depended on the judge that you got and like, maybe how much they liked you in those early days.
It was really sort of the wild, wild west.
Libya helped us with this, and she dug up a pretty fun story about Abraham Lincoln, who was a bar examiner for the state of Illinois in the 1850s and was apparently just like at a hotel, chatting with a lawyer in a room.
And the lawyer answered a few questions and Lincoln was like, congratulations, you're an attorney.
So great, man.
Yeah.
Yeah, I love that story, too.
I mean, I can just see Lincoln busting it out so casually.
Yeah, I think the takeaway is the guy didn't even know the test had begun, essentially.
No, he had no idea.
Exactly.
I'm glad you added that part.
Sure.
So the actual first written bar exam, kind of like they are today, that popped up around 1855, I think, in Massachusetts.
And then it became a requirement about 20 years later in Suffolk County, where Boston was.
And by 1920, written exams were like the way to go.
And because now it wasn't just getting quizzed with the judge law school started popping up and developing to kind of train you to prepare for that written exam, at the very least.
And they actually became an alternative to apprenticing which, as you'll see later on, is kind of inverted these days.
But that was something you could do if, like, say, all of the lawyers in your town were jerks.
Yeah. you could go to a law school instead of apprenticing.
When you graduated law school, then you could take your bar exam.
Those were your two ways, your two paths to the bar exam back then.
Yeah.
By 1921 the American Bar Association was around and they said you know, we really prefer a written exam to license.
I don't think they mandated it at that point.
But they, you know, the states generally kind of fell in line behind the ABA.
And I think by 1931, another decade later, the American Association of Law Schools got together with the committee and they said all right, we need to develop a real system here.
So they came together with the National Conference of Bar Examiners.
And at that time 1930s, they were really like the testing that they were concerned about was what they call black letter law, just sort of Really unambiguous black and white yes or no answers to things on, like you know, how things are literally legally defined, and not a lot of, like you know, hypotheticals being bandied about.
Real world stuff.
Yeah, exactly.
Which you're going to get more these days in the bar exam.
Yeah, but one of the problems with taking a test like that is that your hand can get cramped.
They didn't want prospective lawyers' hands cramping, so in 1972 the National Conference of Bar Examiners came up with the Multi-State Bar Examination.
And that created a multiple choice test.
Yeah.
It also really kind of dug into like your knowledge.
But at the same time you can also say like this is where it became a little more standardized and less loosey goosey.
But in that sense, it also became a little more scientific minded.
Yeah. by creating a test that you could say, this is right, this is wrong.
And it wasn't just legal terms.
They were applying it to hypothetical situations, but it was still multiple choice.
So you could grade it much more easily.
Yeah.
I don't know how I feel about multiple choice in a test like this.
Anytime you can sort of guess.
Right.
I don't think you can necessarily guess your way to success, but I don't know.
I think you just came up with a t-shirt.
Catch your way to success.
Yeah, totally.
And then on the back, just a ABCD and just a check mark next to the C. All of the above.
All of the above.
Go ahead.
You go ahead.
Oh well, as this is sort of developing over the decades I think we're at the 70s here but it kind of became clear during this period that like hey, what we've got here is a gatekeeping service, essentially.
Yeah.
Ostensibly the reason was, like you said, is like we want to keep only, like you know, really knowledgeable people that know what they're doing in these jobs, to protect people that hire them for lots and lots of money.
But as this was happening, it became even more clear that there was a side effect of that, which was
You know immigrants, black people, other people of color that were vying to become attorneys were having a harder time.
And this is evidence really early on in 1912.
They accidentally admitted three black attorneys into the ABA because they didn't have.
You know, like check here for race.
And then they were like, oh, goodness, we accidentally let in three black attorneys.
So we need to start screening basically for race.
Yeah, they said, we need to add a check here for race thing on the application to take the bar exam.
And that's essentially what they did.
So from 1912 all the way to 1943, if you checked African-American or God knows what they had down for you to check back, then you were just not allowed to take the bar exam.
Sorry.
Like this is.
It was an actual, like you said, a gatekeeping mechanism to prevent black people from becoming lawyers in the United States.
And so in 1925, prospective black lawyers said nuts to that.
And they got together with actual black lawyers and they came up with the National Bar Association, which is still around today.
As an alternative for black attorneys, who basically become attorneys rather than have to go through the ABA.
Yeah.
And you know, since then, especially in like the 1970s, there there seemed to be like a series of lawsuits from black lawyers in different states that were suing over various what they thought were, you know, discriminatory policies within the test.
I don't think many of those were successful, though, were they?
No.
The one that sticks out the most, that I've heard the most described, is well, just basically, a good example of the lawsuits that came around at this time was Tyler v Vickery or Tyler v Vickery, if you're a lawyer.
It was a class action suit that alleged that Georgia's bar examinations cut score, which is the minimum score you have to have to pass, had been adjusted with the introduction of the multi-state bar exam.
Remember the multiple choice test that they introduced?
That it had basically been introduced and designed to continue to keep black people from passing the bar exam.
And the Fifth Circuit Court of Georgia said...
We don't really think that's true.
For some reason they said we don't see any intent to discriminate, which is neither here nor there under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prevents employment discrimination.
But they also said, here's the thing, the American Bar Association is not an employer.
They're not a labor organization.
They're not an employment agency.
So therefore, Title VII doesn't really apply to them.
And the court said, ABA, continue to discriminate through the bar exam as you see fit.
Yeah, I don't know much about lawyer stuff.
I don't know spit about lawyering.
No spit.
In my civilian mind, I see that as kind of a punt, legally speaking.
And maybe that's you know.
A lot of times you decide something on precedent and whether or not you feel it's right or not, that's just the precedent.
But I don't know.
That felt like a punt to me by saying like Well, they're not an employer, an agency or a labor organization, so we're just sort of not going to hear this one.
Yeah, and this reveals to me something that I just find fascinating is when lawyers sue other lawyers or bodies of lawyers or judges rule on the test that it takes to create lawyers and therefore judges.
It just seems so fraught.
With basically opinion, because they're so like.
It's not like the judge is learning about this for the first time.
They're coming at it from fresh eyes.
Like this is like part of their fabric is having been a law student and becoming a lawyer and then becoming a judge.
You know, I just find it fascinating.
Yeah, totally.
Should we wrap up sort of the testing stuff and then take a break?
Yeah, let's get back into the evolution of the test again.
Yeah.
So now we're in the late 80s, 1988.
I'm a junior in high school, still seeking that first kiss.
And the NCBE has added the multi-state essay examination at this point.
So now you're back to essaying, which is how it previously had been until that multiple choice test.
Right.
And in 97 it handed over the multi-state performance test, or the MPT test, which says hey, let's sort of do like, do some practice stuff, like write up a brief for me or write out a memo, draft a memo.
Let's see how you do on that.
And then finally, in 2011, the uniform bar exam, or the UBE, was adopted by most states, where all three of those tests kind of make that one up as one big test.
Yeah, which is, you know, if you're a state and you don't feel like going to the trouble of coming up with your entire your own bar exam now, you can just use the UBE.
Yeah.
And it's proven, like there's all sorts of great questions in there.
You sacrificed state law.
But a lot of people say, like well, like law students don't need to sit around and memorize state law.
That's a waste of time in favor of the UBE, which is pretty rich, because a lot of people argue that the UBE itself is a waste of time because you have to memorize general law rather than state law, which we'll talk more about that.
I just I'm chomping at the bit right now.
Yeah, but it did make it like more easy to transfer from state to state and stuff like that.
Right.
And we'll get into those specifics too, but let's take that break.
Okay.
And we'll get into the basics of the bar right after this.
I'm Stephen Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut.
I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of developing the profile of this beautiful finished product.
With every sip, you get a little something different.
Visit Gentleman'sCutBourbon.com for your nearest Total Wines or BevMo.
This message is intended for audiences 21 and older.
Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky.
For more on Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, please visit Gentleman'sCutBourbon.com.
Please enjoy responsibly.
On an all new episode of iHeartRadio's Las Culturistas, actress and director Brittany Snow opens up about challenging age bias.
Hollywood wants to kind of disregard women after the age of 32.
And she reflects on the responsibility of inspiring other women.
You.
Sharing your story might just be really small to you, but it might be the story that someone needs to feel like there's hope.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Las Culturistas, and listen to the full podcast now.
I'm Kristen Davis, host of the podcast, Are You a Charlotte?
The most anticipated guest from season three is here, the Trey to my Charlotte.
Kyle McLaughlin joins me to relive all of the magical Trey and Charlotte moments.
He reveals what he thinks of Trey giving Charlotte a cardboard baby.
Why would I bring her a cardboard baby?
I was literally, I was like, this doesn't track for me at all.
When he found out Trey's shortcomings.
I'm kind of excited at talking about you know.
I think he's a guy who spends time in Central Park.
You know he's probably going to need some surgery stuff, you know, and I was like all this kind of stuff going on and they were like yeah yeah yeah, fine.
And they said, but he's impotent.
And I was like, he's impotent. and why he chose not to return to In Just Like That.
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So, Chuck, it turns out there's 56 jurisdictions in the United States.
Who knew?
I didn't.
50 states plus some territories.
You got some overseas possessions.
You got, you know.
What else?
So there's 56 and each jurisdiction has its own like highest agency.
That basically says these are the standards to become a lawyer in the state.
And again, a lot of them just said you have to pass the uniform bar exam.
That's the standard.
But they also can kind of mess with it here or there.
And it's up to this agency that's associated with the highest court in the state, usually the state Supreme Court.
Yeah, exactly.
In most jurisdictions, if you just to take the bar exam, you have to have graduated from an accredited law school from the American Bar Association, which usually means a three year program.
Some states though, are like hey, if you're not, if you didn't go to an accredited school, that's fine.
We'll still let you take the bar.
If you are in Washington state Virginia, Vermont or California, they allow a legal apprenticeship to swap out law school, which I think is super kind of cool.
And Maine and New York let you sub out like a year or two of that law school for an apprenticeship.
Yeah, for sure, which is pretty neat.
It's old school.
It's a throwback kind of thing.
Yeah.
If you want to take the bar exam, most of the time it's given in February and July.
Those are your two options.
And then you're going to pay some money for it.
And there's a lot of ways you're going to pay money for it.
Just to register to take it, the bar exam itself, it can be a few hundred dollars.
It can be more than a thousand dollars, depending on your state and how greedy they are.
Yeah.
If you want to use a laptop, you want to type out your briefs and your memos and your essays rather than write them out because you get hand cramps like the old lawyers used to.
Yeah.
You're going to have to pay a fee for that.
And the reason why is because there is no chance you're going to be allowed to bring your own laptop, because they keep the place so tight and are so hawkish about preventing cheating that they actually provide tampons to people who need them.
Because you're not allowed to bring in your own tampon.
Wow.
Really?
Yeah, it's happened.
And apparently it's not just an isolated thing that they have a bowl of tampons.
Wow.
And you grab one if you need it and you hope that they don't run out if you really need it.
So yeah, it's like there's no way you're bringing your own laptop in.
Yeah, or tampon.
Exactly.
So, wow, I never knew that.
That's a nice little tidbit.
Thanks.
I thought that was pretty great, too.
So you have to have money to register, like you said.
You have to have money to, you know, a lot of times people take off work for several months.
So you have to have a life that can do that, you know, which indicates a certain amount of at least either privilege or maybe hard work and saving, if that's how you did it, which is great.
And then, almost assuredly, you have paid several thousand dollars, maybe as much as 6000, to take preparatory courses.
About 60% of the market share in the United States is a company called BARBRI.
It can be up to $6,000, maybe as low as $1,800.
And they have been around since the 1950s.
And I was like, what does BARBRI stand for?
And I had a A weirdly hard time finding out what it stood for until I sadly, Wikipedia just turned it up.
I should have gone to the most obvious place.
But I think when they merged in 2021, or no, no, no, they merged in the 70s, I think.
And it was just the names of two companies.
I think Bay Area Review was BAR and the Bar Review Inc. was BRI.
And so they just squashed those together.
So kind of a boring story.
Yeah.
I had seen that it was a merger of Barbizon Modeling School and Brie, meaning the makers of Brie cheese around the world.
Wow.
That's a mashup I could enjoy.
Right.
And the 6000 one that you can pay for.
Like the premium test prep, they actually have somebody take the test for you and they even provide the person with a wig that matches your hair.
So it looks a lot like you, too.
Yeah.
I did see, though, they have a guarantee.
If you do not, if you pay that money to them and you don't pass the bar you, I think, you get to take the course again for free one more time if you're taking the exam again.
Okay.
That's not bad.
So you don't get your money back, but you get to retake the course at no charge.
No.
Barbara's on modeling has long had a motto, you don't get your money back.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
So let's break down the UBE, the Uniform Bar Examination, which is the culmination of decades of the National Conference of Bar Examiners' hard work sweat blood tears joy, pain.
Yeah.
And again, you can break it down into three parts that kind of came along separately.
The first, remember, was that multiple choice test, the multi-state bar examination.
Yeah.
There's 200 multiple choice questions.
I've seen 175.
I guess it depends on.
I don't know, your jurisdiction and how much, how valuable they find 25 questions.
Yeah, maybe.
But it covers seven different areas of the law.
You want to take them?
Sure.
Simple procedure, contracts, of course.
Nice.
Torts.
Ooh.
Constitutional law.
Mm-hmm.
Criminal law, the sexiest law.
Careful.
Criminal law and procedure, that is.
Evidence, which is its own category, and real property.
Ka-ching.
And that is 50 percent of the UBE score.
Then the the other two are the multistate essay once again, which is 30 percent.
And then the two multistate performance test tasks.
And that is 20 percent.
Yeah.
So you're like, OK, I could take that.
No problem.
Sure.
You might be able to take it.
You probably wouldn't pass.
And you'd give up 12 hours plus of your life, 12 hours just of the test.
It's spread out over three days technically, but the UBE takes up two of those days.
12 hours divided by two days divided by four sessions.
So three in the morning, three in the afternoon.
Go to your hotel room, can't sleep, toss and turn, come back the next morning.
Three in the morning, three in the afternoon.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh well, we should mention too.
That's another reason you might be paying some extra money if you don't live near a testing site, like travel and room and board and all that stuff.
Good point.
And scotch at the end of the day, of course.
That's right.
It's graded on a 400-point scale.
Depends on the state on what they consider passing.
Generally, 260 to 270.
I said state, of course, jurisdiction.
And then apparently it's like, it's not like acing the bar gets you anything more than passing the bar.
You pass it and that's great.
But I have some inside info from attorney friends, which I'll kind of dabble in here and there.
But I think it's sort of untoward to you don't go in and be like, oh, it's the bar.
Yeah, I saw a Reddit post where somebody posted like, I got a score of 330.
And I mean, is that high?
I don't mean to make anybody who's got lower than that feel bad, but I'm just curious.
Like, what do you guys think?
And it was like, you disgust us.
Shut up.
Like that is just sad.
So, yeah, it's not really cool to flex on people over your bar score.
And you pass.
Exactly.
That's all that matters.
That's right.
And then, if you do pass, there's always a gaggle of attorneys usually quite experienced, seasoned attorneys who just are waiting for you to finish.
And when you finish, they embrace you.
And that's how you know that you've passed the bar exam.
Right.
We did mention that those UBE scores are portable.
It's not like the old days when you had to pass that state's bar.
I think that's how it used to be kind of across the board.
They're transferable for two to five years after taking the exam.
It depends on the jurisdiction, of course.
And then if you're in a jurisdiction that doesn't utilize that UBE test, Most of them still have the MBE as a big part of their exam, usually with their own specific like state law stuff, if they do that.
And there's usually also a third day, which you were talking about earlier, that third test which is like a 60 question ethics test.
Right.
It's called the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination, the MPRE.
Yes.
And they ask you questions.
It's scored separately, but they have questions.
Like you know, Attorney Lionel Hutz brought in a bag of pot to one of his one of his clients into prison.
Is Attorney Hutz guilty of loving too much?
Right.
Was that a real Simpsons thing?
No.
OK, because I could see that.
They only really talked about pot like on a couple of really great episodes, but you know.
No, that wasn't their bag.
Not normally.
That wasn't their bag of pot.
No, yeah.
That wasn't their sack.
Don't use that word.
Yeah, sack's kind of gross, isn't it?
Moist.
Oh, boy.
What was the other one?
Moist sack.
Oh.
Or pussy.
Go look that up in the transcript.
Don't.
Don't.
Don't do it.
Let's talk about pass rates because it really obviously depends on the state.
They can vary pretty wildly, actually, from looking at some of these stats.
I think for first timers from July of this year's testing 2025 first timer pass rates there was a range like from 66 percent in Connecticut to to almost 90 in Utah.
So go Utah.
If you look at overall rates, not necessarily just first timers 2025, only 54 in the state of Alabama.
Once again, compared to 86 in Utah.
So I don't know what's in the water out there in Utah, but those attorneys are sipping it up.
Oh, it's widely considered a really easy state to pass the bar.
Oh, is it really?
Yeah.
Oh, interesting.
Okay.
Some very hard places to take the bar.
Around the world, actually, that I saw it.
Nigeria, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Ontario, Canada.
Okay.
New York State.
New York State's bar exam is so difficult.
It's like as hard as the entire nations of Singapore's.
So it definitely varies by jurisdiction and by country just how hard it can be.
Wow.
That's interesting.
I do know that of the 2022 graduates, this is just another sort of stat for you.
Over 90 percent of graduates from accredited schools pass within a couple of years.
But there's from what I see, there's really no shame to for it to take a crack or two to pass the bar.
I don't think.
I don't know if it's something you're going to like run around the office telling people on your first day.
Right.
But I don't think it's like a mark of shame.
There have been plenty of very successful attorneys, very famous attorneys that didn't pass the bar on the first go, including Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton.
All the Dems.
I think JFK, yeah, a bunch of DIMs.
JFK Jr., I think, took two or three times to pass.
I saw that.
And old Kim Kardashian took a time or two.
Yeah, I think three.
And there's actually limits on how many times you can take it, depending on your state, your jurisdiction, your territory.
Oh, well, they just say, sorry, it sounds like you should try another line of work.
There are some places that say that.
I don't know if they actually say that.
The gaggle of attorneys tells you that when you fail the sixth time.
But there are other places that have discretionary rules where after you reach a certain number like say, I think six is the highest I've seen.
You can apply to take it again.
You can basically go to the state bar and be like, please, I want to be a lawyer so bad.
I'm just really terrible at this.
Yeah, I mean, it is a test and some people aren't great test takers.
We'll kind of talk about that in a little bit.
But also I imagine there's plenty of things you can do with the law degree if you haven't passed the bar right.
Yeah.
I mean, it's like you see somebody referred to like oh, this is a lawyer or something, but they have, like they're in some field that has nothing to do with law.
Yeah.
You're just like they very frequently are advisors, like just they know how how far you can bend the law.
OK.
A lot of stuff you can do with it.
All right.
Yeah.
You guys teach, I imagine.
Oh, yeah.
That's you.
I have a little cute little addition addendum to this this part.
Let's go.
The youngest person ever to pass the bar is Sophia Park.
She passed the bar in 2024 at age 17, 17 years, eight months.
And was that after law school even?
Yeah, she started law school at 13.
Oh, she's one of those.
So she beat the previous record by three months.
The previous record had been set at age, I guess, 18 years and one month by her brother, Peter.
Wow.
Isn't that nuts?
It's a smart family.
It is.
They really wanted to be lawyers.
Yeah.
Or, you know, are they practicing law or are they just like, I just wanted to show off?
Oh, I believe they're both practicing law.
Yeah, I guess so.
Well, should we take another break, Chuck?
I guess we should.
Well, one more little tidbit here at the end.
You know, we said that a bar exam is basically to say, hey, you can practice law.
The one other thing that it does is it helps determine what schools can teach it, because the ABA requires that law schools.
If you want to be in an accredited law school, a certain percentage of your graduates have to pass the bar within two years.
Otherwise, your accreditation goes away.
Yeah, I saw 75% of your graduates have to pass.
All right, or they're like, sorry, I guess you're not teaching well enough.
Exactly.
I wanted my tidbit to be last, so I'm just going to repeat it now, okay?
On second thought, we'll just go to break.
How about that?
All right, we'll be right back.
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All right.
So we're back with more critiques and problems on the bar, because if you start to do a little digging, it turns out there's been a lot of that over the years for a lot of different reasons.
We've mentioned some of this stuff while it was developing, basically banning people of color from even taking the test for a long time.
But black and Hispanic Americans are still very underrepresented in the field of law.
And you know that's a problem because when you're a practicing attorney like a lot of opinion that's why they call them opinions and judgment goes into it.
And sure, it's based on precedent, but your perspective is important.
And having diverse perspectives is also important.
Right.
Yeah, for sure.
It's a white male profession, essentially.
Statistically speaking, that is far and away the largest population represented in the legal profession in the United States.
And there's statistics and figures that kind of show the disparity here.
There's some data from 2021 from the American Bar Association that showed that white law school graduates passed on their first try at the bar exam at a rate 24 higher than black students, 13 higher than Hispanic students and 15 higher than Native Americans.
So those are really substantial disparities in passing the bar the first time.
And so being in the hot seat, the National Conference of Bar Examiners, is like hey hey hey, everybody mellow out here.
This tracks with other scoring of racial disparities, like law school grades, LSAT grades.
This is in line with them.
Just leave the bar exam alone.
And, by the way, their interpretation is that this is an example of longstanding systemic racial disparities in the American education system that start way back, long before somebody gets to law school and goes to take the bar.
And the bar exam is just showing this.
It's just reflecting this problem elsewhere.
So again, stop looking at the bar is essentially what the NCBE says.
It also kind of sounds like we're just a part of the grand history of systemic discrimination throughout our country.
Well, that's a critique of them, too.
People are like, that's your answer?
Like, we're just perpetuating an already existing racial disparity.
Like, that's essentially what they're saying in that argument.
Yeah, it's definitely a strange argument.
Other people say that you know.
Just part of that disparity is you know the cost associated with law school and to be a successful candidate.
And, like we said, the privilege that it takes to maybe be able to pay for that and then take off months, work and and pay for the very best preparatory courses.
You know, that's it's just sort of all in the big soup of privilege, you know.
Right.
I saw that black and Hispanic students who take the bar exam are 50 percent likelier to work during their bar prep period than a white student.
Like it's just logistically speaking.
Racially speaking, it's just much likelier that a white test taker is going to be able to not work and just dedicate their time to prepping for the bar.
Yeah.
I mean that alone explains a lot of it, because the bar exam is essentially like it's a standardized test where you memorize essentially year one law school stuff.
Yeah.
I mean, that's one of the other critiques is that, you know, it's a memorization test.
And there have been plenty of studies that show that it doesn't necessarily isn't a marker toward your future performance as an attorney or like how successful you may be.
Right.
There was a study in 2024 from Nevada that compared scores on the MBE and other components of their test of, I think, a little more than 500 new attorneys and how they were basically rated, how affected they were by their peers and their supervisors and judges.
And they did find a small positive relationship between some of the ratings, some parts of the bar, but at the end of the day overall they said it was minimally predictive of career success and the Nevada performance test was negligibly related to success.
Yeah.
Those low correlations were as low as 1-4 percent.
I think 4 percent was the highest.
As far as the actual whole bar exam relating to these ratings of how effective these lawyers were by their peers, they said we can only account for that with 12 of the bar exam.
The other.
The rest of the distinctions or the differences in effectiveness has nothing to do with their score on the bar exam.
And so people say, like, well, what the heck is the bar exam doing?
And again the National Conference of Bar Examiners are like we're testing for lawyer competence to protect the public dummy.
And people say, well, how are you testing for legal competence?
Yeah.
Like what is legal competence?
And this is where the National Conference of Board Examiners like, pull their shirt away from their necks and you can see like some sweat breaking out on their forehead because they've never given a definition of competence.
And if you don't have a definition of competence, how can you, in a standardized way, test people for whether they meet that definition or not?
So people say like the bar exam under that description is by definition invalid.
It's not a valid test, meaning that it doesn't test the thing it purports to test, because we just have no idea what it is testing.
You know what you just sounded like?
What?
An attorney.
Sounds like you just dropped the mic in court and then sat down and I was to your just sat down on your left and I put my hand on your shoulder and was like hell yeah, man.
Got him.
There have also been a lot of just sort of disasters in recent years, very public ones in terms of the bar.
During COVID, they offered remote exams, and it was just sort of a joke in a lot of cases.
There were a lot of computer problems like programs crashing.
They had facial recognition issues in that sometimes they failed to identify patients.
Dark skin test takers.
So that's that's bad right off the bat.
You also again, you know, it was remote.
So you had to keep your eyes on the screen at all times or they would think you're cheating if you're looking around or looking into your lap or something.
So people were like literally urinating themselves in their seat because they couldn't move.
And one woman went into labor and went through the test and gave birth and then came home and finished the second day.
Yeah, if you want to know how tough Loyola University law students are, there you go.
What about California with the GPT questions?
This one.
It's got a lot of schadenfreude around it, but California said nuts to the UBE.
We can do a better program ourselves and save money.
So they designed their own bar exam like just completely eschewed the uniform bar examination right.
Yeah.
And it just, the rollout was horrible.
There were people who were taking the test, they would get error messages.
The program would crash during the test.
It wouldn't save their essays.
Can you imagine finishing an essay and clicking to save it?
And they're like, nope, sorry, do it again.
That's every student's nightmare.
Yeah.
And remember, this is time.
Like you have three hours per segment, right?
Like if you don't finish in time, sorry, like you have to stop.
So that's a huge part of it.
And then also, like you said ChatGPT, it turned out, was involved, because some students were like there are misspellings and typos in some of these multiple choice questions.
And the California State Bar said, wait, what?
Yeah.
It turns out that some of those questions were chat beat GPT written by chat GPT.
They weren't even reviewed by a lawyer or copy edited by the state agency that oversaw the test.
Because, you know, I don't know money, I guess.
And this was another case of lawyers suing lawyers and lawyers suing their state bar and all that.
And like California has just lost so much money on it.
Remember, this is a money saving thing, too.
So, right.
Again, there's like a little bit of schadenfreude to it.
Yeah, and there was one incident in New York where someone went into cardiac arrest while taking the test.
That was this year in the July test.
And, you know, people are like, you know, we should help here, right?
And the test proctors were like no everyone, be quiet.
And, like you know, just keep taking your test, and we'll deal with this in the next lunch break.
Yeah, like they had to keep taking their tests while the paramedics were saving this person's life like next to them, essentially.
That was what they were forced to do.
That's how, I don't know, you choose your own word.
They are about assigning these tests or carrying out these tests.
I was working a TV commercial one time as a PA years ago out in the desert in California and a crew member had a cardiac arrest and the director told them to move a big fake rock in front of and they were tending to the guy but they were like we need to keep shooting.
Like, go move that big fake rock in front of the paramedics so we can keep shooting.
I guess it's better than the director being like, take that fake rock and finish him off with it.
Yeah, yeah.
And then drag him out of the way.
One thing I wondered, because I always kind of wonder, like how would we do if we took the SAT now, like you know, at this stage in life, or something?
I wondered about, like, a really experienced attorney years later if they took the bar again.
And Livia dug into that and found a study from 2021.
16 like successful experienced practicing attorneys from Oklahoma retook the bar essentially with no prep.
It was just like, you know, their prep was their career.
Yeah.
On the theory that, hey, if it's measuring ability, then this should bear out in the grades.
And none of them passed.
They got scores ranging from 26 to 52 percent.
So nobody would have passed that bar.
And the lawyers who have been practicing longest did the worst out of all of them.
Mm-hmm.
And then one general criticism of the bar exam too, in addition to everything else we've just talked about, is that it doesn't in any real way kind of jibe with what these lawyers are going to do in the legal profession.
Right.
It's general questions about law generally in the United States.
Again, it's essentially the stuff you learn in your first year at law school, because the next two years you start to get into your specialization.
And it's a lot of memory and memorization and a lot of lawyering after you graduate and go through the bar and become an attorney is open book research to figure out what law applies.
The bar exam is closed book rapid fire testing.
So they're like.
This is not like even putting away everything else, all the other arguments at its base.
It's kind of a flawed test to start with.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
And because of that there are a lot of jurisdictions that have long had workarounds and alternatives, and there are changes on the horizon for the bar itself.
Wisconsin.
It's the only state I guess only jurisdiction that never stopped saying hey, you went to law school and you can practice law in this state.
You don't have to take the bar here, which is pretty cool.
I think you have to graduate from one of the state's two law schools there, and they call it diploma privilege.
I think in the past couple of decades, New Hampshire has followed suit a little bit.
And if you graduate with honors from University of New Hampshire Law School and you participate in court simulations and have practical experience, then you can be admitted to practice law without the bar.
Yeah.
And we had said earlier that the law school was originally created as an alternative to apprenticeship.
Some states have gone the other way now where the apprenticeships are alternatives to law school.
I like that.
I like it, too.
Vermont and Virginia they allow apprenticeships instead of actually instead of the bar exams themselves.
Oregon offers apprenticeships where, if you're a law school graduate, you can become a lawyer without the bar exam.
If you apprentice for, I think, 675 hours over four weeks in supervised work, you will basically become a lawyer after that.
Four weeks?
Four months?
No, four weeks.
Four years?
Yeah.
No, I was joking.
There's only 675 hours in four weeks.
Oh, okay.
So you'd be doing 24 hours a day for a month as an apprentice, which seems hardcore.
I'll assume your math checks out.
It does.
I even used a calculator.
Oh, great.
I think Washington State has a plan coming in 2026.
So more states are kind of getting on board with this.
California last year actually rejected a proposal to become more like Oregon with those apprenticeship hours, even though the state bar of California's board of trustees said we think this is a good idea.
The state Supreme Court said, no, no, no.
But coming around the corner now, we have the next gen bar exam, right?
Yeah, the NCBE is like, everybody settle down.
So starting in 2018, they're like, we're going to change this a little bit.
The tests are going to be shorter.
We're going to make it so it's possible to take it remotely if need be.
And then it's just going to be a little different where...
I think it's a little more essay heavy than the original test.
But they're also carving out some stuff that they're not going to test on, like family law and that kind of thing.
So it's a little leaner, meaner kind of bar exam that they're coming up with.
Two things that I saw that are worth mentioning real quick.
If you do away with the bar exam, there's a couple of benefits to that.
One is that it puts the onus on law schools themselves to graduate competent lawyers.
Right now there are some law schools that are considered diploma mills, because as long as 75 of your graduates pass the bar within two years, like you stay accredited and you can make a lot of money off that other 25.
That's one thing that would happen.
Another one is that legal fees would probably come down.
Because one of the functions of gatekeeping that the bar exam does is it artificially keeps the supply of lawyers low, which artificially inflates the fees associated with lawyers too.
Pretty neat.
I didn't think about that.
Yeah.
Yeah, I spoke to my friend.
I think I know a few attorneys here and there, but only like one good friend who's a lawyer, who is electing to remain anonymous in this case.
But I did text him kind of about all this.
And he said.
I would say it's only useful in that it shows how you can collect and synthesize a lot of information under time pressure.
But that's not really much different than most standardized tests.
But as far as being an indicator of how you'll be as a practitioner, yeah, not so much.
He says, for example, the bar will test you to some extent on the rules of civil procedure, but passing the bar doesn't mean you can walk into a deposition the day after you pass and know how to do that.
As someone who's taken hundreds of depositions, you learn by watching, listening to more experienced attorneys do it, and then by trial and error no pun intended doing it yourself.
He is in favor of the apprenticeships.
He said it's probably a lot more helpful as long as your mentor, you know, knew what they were doing.
And then said one thing he would like to see change is like I think more emphasis on writing.
He said I see so many briefs written by someone who allegedly passed the bar.
They're just horrible.
He said that's probably just a criticism of the legal education more than the bar.
And then he said he wanted to remain anonymous.
And he said I know it sounds silly or overly cautious when there are SCOTUS justices who can accept luxury vacations with impunity, but I'm supposed to be impartial here, so ragging on the bar might not be a good look.
I think that's smart.
Yeah.
You got anything else?
I got nothing else.
Well, thanks for tapping your anonymous friend.
That was good info.
Sure.
If you want to learn more about the bar exam, go take the bar exam.
And in the meantime, it's time for listener mail.
That'd be kind of fun.
I mean, if it was free, I would take the bar exam just to like with zero knowledge of anything, just to see like how poorly I would do.
Yeah, I would, too.
I'd be right next to you peeing in my seat and going into labor and having a heart attack.
Wouldn't that be funny, though, if we got like, I don't know, even like a 20 percent or something?
Or if we passed and we just automatically became lawyers.
Yeah, let's do it.
All right.
All right, this is about the Salton Sea.
You called for a listener mail, right?
Mm-hmm.
All right.
Hey, guys, I was listening to the Salton Sea episode.
In college, I took an ocean geography class and learned about inland seas.
And inland sea, because remember, we sort of wondered the difference between seas and lakes.
Mm-hmm.
He said, an inland sea can either be entirely landlocked or have a single river connected to the ocean.
Inland seas are larger than lakes and have a salinity between a lake and an ocean.
So I think you've mentioned something about salinity.
There are typically remnants of larger oceans and have numerous islands.
But of course the scientific community names these things and sometimes it can be rather confusing.
The Caspian Sea, for example, is classified as a lake, despite being known as the largest inland sea in the world.
And the Hudson Bay... is an island sea, or, which is, did you know that?
An island sea or inland sea?
He says island, but probably meant inland.
Okay.
I didn't know.
I had no idea.
Whether it's an island sea or an inland sea, I had no idea.
Or Dylan's favorite sea is the Larapentine Sea or the Larapentine Sea.
It's an ancient sea that split Australia in half during the Cambrian explosion.
Being a longtime listener and learning about new things is the best part of my commute, guys.
That is from Dylan.
Thanks a lot, Dylan.
That was great info.
I still like your interpretation Chuck which, if I remember correctly, you were saying that an inland lake would be landlocked.
I think
Yeah, I mean, it sounds like there's no true definition.
I don't know.
Well, then let's keep going with yours.
Great.
Nice try, Dylan.
If you want to be like Dylan and send us a great email, you can send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradiocom.
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I'm Stephen Curry, and this is Gentleman's Cut.
I think what makes Gentleman's Cut different is me being a part of developing the profile of this beautiful finished product.
With every sip, you get a little something different.
Visit Gentleman'sCutBourbon.com for your nearest Total Wines or BevMo.
This message is intended for audiences 21 and older.
Gentleman's Cut Bourbon, Boone County, Kentucky.
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What up, y'all?
It's your boy Kev on stage.
I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Best Moment, where I talk to artists athletes entertainers creators friends, people I admire who had massive success, about their massive failures.
What did they mess up on?
What is their heartbreak and what did they learn from it?
I got judged horribly.
The judges were like, you're trash.
I don't know how you got on the show.
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On an all new episode of iHeartRadio's Las Culturistas, actress and director Brittany Snow opens up about challenging age bias.
Hollywood wants to kind of disregard women after the age of 32.
And she reflects on the responsibility of inspiring other women.
You.
Sharing your story might just be really small to you, but it might be the story that someone needs to feel like there's hope.
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