Legal letdowns

Bar exam results reflect a need for some law schools to examine admission procedures.

The results from the July 2015 Texas bar are in: 23.4 percent of students who graduated from Texas law schools and who were taking the test for the first time failed the exam needed for them to become licensed attorneys. The failure rates at Texas Southern University Law School (44.54 percent) and St. Mary’s University School of Law (38.04 percent) in San Antonio were the worst among the nine reporting Texas schools.

Traditionally, the pass rate for those taking the bar for the second time is low, and these results were no exception. About 62 percent of Texas law school grads who retook the test failed. The reasons behind this stat are complex. Undoubtedly, some aspiring lawyers are working full time and their initial failure battered their confidence.

But some students who graduate from law school after a three-year course of study and incurring significant debt are not likely to ever pass the bar. It’s unclear how many of these “never passers” graduated from schools in Texas. But one legal education journal article estimated 150,000 “never passers” in the U.S. in 2010. This number “amounts to one in 10 J.D.s and the risk falls disparately on black, Hispanic and Asian law school graduates,” according to Jane Yakowitz, author of the journal article.

A law school education has value regardless of whether a lawyer earns a license. But a law degree without a license is not as valuable to a typical graduate. The legal education system needs to examine its admissions and licensing procedures to make sure hardworking students who apply and are admitted to law schools have a fair shot to become licensed attorneys.

Compounding the problem, the debt that students must incur to attend law school has shot up since 2010. The average student borrowed $60,124 at Texas Tech University School of Law in 2010. That went up 40.2 percent to $84,272 in 2014, according to the Law School Transparency website, while average debt at the University of Texas School of Law climbed by 28.6 percent.

For students who ultimately are not successful in obtaining a law degree, dreams of a six-figure salary fade fast, but the debt lingers. Even for those who pass the bar, prospects for employment have dropped over the past few years.

While the admissions processes at some Texas schools may not do enough to screen unqualified applicants, the bar exam — with its emphasis on memorization — may keep some law school graduates with the potential to be good lawyers from practicing. Certainly, a good practitioner needs a solid background knowledge of the law, but in today’s world the black letter law is readily available on the Internet. The bar exam should encompass a greater range of skills and emphasize the ability to reason and communicate like a lawyer.

At least, the bar is a good measure of students’ dedication to their careers because passage usually takes countless hours of study. Unfortunately, however, many already debt-strapped students have to pay out another fee (upward of $1,000) for a bar review course to have a realistic chance of passing.

Law schools should not be forced into the position of teaching to the test but should work to make scholarships for bar review courses available to their students.

Are there too many law schools? Are law schools admitting too many students? Are they not doing a good job educating them? It’s hard to say. The only thing that is clear is that our legal education system is letting too many students down.

Some might argue that the low passage rate at certain schools doesn’t represent a problem; after all, our state doesn’t need more lawyers, and certainly not more unqualified lawyers. But we don’t need a legal education system that encourages false expectations, either.