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> The move follows a sometimes furious debate in California legal circles over whether the state’s passing score, or “cut score” — 144 — was unrealistic. If the passing score were unrealistic, there would be no lawyers in CA. Since there are lawyers in CA, the passing score is both realistic and achievable. I'm not an attorney in CA, but I imagine the score measures both intelligence and knowledge in the field. Why s…
Bar passage rates are falling because law schools have become increasingly theoretical. Many law professors have never had actual clients who pay them for legal work, or have worked as lawyers in the real world for less than five years. These profs are producing interesting academic scholarship but they are increasingly isolated from the legal profession. Law school classes, perhaps as result, tend not to teach what…
I wonder how many Computer Science professors out there used to be real "in-the-weeds" practicing software engineers.
Bar passage rates are falling because law schools have become increasingly theoretical. Many law professors have never had actual clients who pay them for legal work, or have worked as lawyers in the real world for less than five years. These profs are producing interesting academic scholarship but they are increasingly isolated from the legal profession. Law school classes, perhaps as result, tend not to teach what…
Bar passage rates are falling because law schools have become increasingly theoretical. Many law professors have never had actual clients who pay them for legal work, or have worked as lawyers in the real world for less than five years. These profs are producing interesting academic scholarship but they are increasingly isolated from the legal profession. Law school classes, perhaps as result, tend not to teach what…
The bar exam tests what you learn in law school. However, that is only the bare minimum for what you actually need to know to practice law.
Coming from a lawyer who passed Illinois in 2004 and took California's bar in 2014, I can say that for my CA test, the passage rate for attorneys barred in other states was around 20% (if I recall). California has differences in its laws that make it naturally harder than the "collective norm." Further, part of that low passage rate is because of two factors: 1) most attorneys already barred work full time, thus stud…
To expand on this, as a non-lawyer who pays lawyers, I absolutely refuse to sign anything under California law which doesn't have to be. The courts take three to 4 times longer than Delaware's [1], there are a bunch of BS rules you have to spend ten pages having both parties mutually agree to exculpate from their proceedings and the lawyers, given all this and the difficulty of the exam, are a time and a half as expensive as New York's.
[1] "For fiscal year 2014, the average elapsed from filing to disposition [for the Delaware Supreme Court] was only 154.2 days, and the average elapsed time from submission to disposition was only 27.3 days" [a]. Meanwhile, in California, the median time to process an appeal, statewide, is 518 days, ranging from 423 in Ventura to 693 in Sacramento [b].
[a] http://courts.delaware.gov/AOC/docs/ACTL-DSBA-Full-Report.pd... pages 2 and 3
[b] http://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/2016-Court-Statistics-Rep... page 28
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how many Computer Science professors out there used to be real "in-the-weeds" practicing software engineers.
Computer Science isn't Software Engineering...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Computer Science isn't Software Engineering...
Not sure why you're getting down-voted, you're absoluteley right.
People who then go to build software systems are at least hopefully applying at least some engineering principles. Software arguably often doesn't follow as well-established engineering principles as some other types of engineering. But arguing there's some great separation between computer science and engineering really is pedantic.
This is a great example of a statistic that is interesting but needs more context to be useful. Did the authors check to see whether other California law schools saw a similar decline? If so, why call out Whittier? If not, wouldn't that suggest that the problem is with Whittier and not with the bar program? What am I supposed to infer, being told only that at least one school saw a decline?
Edit: I looked it up. There apparently aren't reported numbers for Whittier because fewer than 11 of their students sat for the bar exam for the first time in 2017. So the statistic is even less useful than I suspected.