Shaping the bar: the future of attorney licensing

"In Shaping the Bar, Joan Howarth describes how the twin gatekeepers of the legal profession -- law schools and licensers -- are failing the public with devastating consequences.

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 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 --