Posted on 10/01/2010 10:40:08 PM PDT by Qbert
It took Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, five attempts to pass the Alaska Bar Exam, a piece of her biography that has gone unreported until now, when she faces a long-shot write-in bid for another term in her Senate seat.
Murkowski, who graduated in 1985 from Willamette University's College of Law in Oregon, wasn't admitted to the Alaska Bar until November 1987.
She flunked the exam in July 1985, February 1986, July 1986 and again in February 1987. She passed on her fifth try in July 1987. Murkowski said that although her failures on the exam aren't something she talks about regularly, she's never hidden them. It's an example of how she "stayed in there," Murkowski said, "and I did not quit."
[Snip]
Miller - the other lawyer in the race - is a 1995 graduate of Yale's law school. He took the Alaska Bar Exam once, passing it in July 1995. He was admitted to practice law in Alaska in November 1995. Generally, about two-thirds of people taking the exam passed it in the years Murkowski failed it. In July 1985 and February 1986, 69 percent passed; 62 percent passed in July 1986, and 74 percent in February 1987.
The year she passed it, 63 percent of exam-takers aced it.
(Excerpt) Read more at kansascity.com ...
Actually, having taken the bar (and yes, passed the first time) and having first hand knowledge of how extremely difficult a test it is, I would say that it’s not unheard of for a smart person to have to take the bar multiple times to pass. It IS unheard of for a smart person to take seven years to complete college if they are going full-time.
So I would have to say that you have to be infinitely dumber to take seven years to go through college (assuming you are a full-time student for those seven years, which I assume Palin was not), than to take the bar five times.
Obama did have a license, he just retired it when he went to Congress. People who don’t understand the process of legal licensure are trying to spin it into either “he never had a law license” or “he was disbarred.” So...pay no attention to that strawman behind the curtain.
Having taken and passed as well, I agree with you that her having stuck in there for multiple tries says something good about her — and we would probably also agree that the bar exam has just about zero to do with how good a lawyer you will be once you get out in practice and become an expert in your area of law.
And you probably had to article for a year too, didn’t you? Canada has IMHO a much better system for legal licensure.
I put my head down on my desk and cried on both days of the bar exam. And yes, by the end of the day the room did smell like a dog kennel. And for me, that room was the Jacob Javits Center so there were 5000 people in it taking the bar.
Look, there are a lot of reasons to despise Obama, but this story about him surrendering his license for wrongdoing is just BS that makes us look stupid.
Both Obamas went “inactive” on their law licenses when their positions no longer required law licenses. They can reactivate their licenses at any time and a cursory look at the Illinois Bar website reveals that. Going inactive is not an uncommon thing to do — I have had friends do it when they no longer needed an active license .I wish I could do it, it would save me $2000 a year in bar fees and CLE.
Thank you, and IIRC, the young Kennedy, John Junior, also failed his bar exam 3 or 4 times before he finally passed.
“Actually, having taken the bar (and yes, passed the first time) and having first hand knowledge of how extremely difficult a test it is, I would say that it’s not unheard of for a smart person to have to take the bar multiple times to pass. It IS unheard of for a smart person to take seven years to complete college if they are going full-time.”
Oh yea. If you are working your way through school, it can take that long. Or if you change majors, it can take that long. How many years you spend in college has nothing to do with your intelligence. But going through three years of law school and probably multiple bar review courses and still failing it FOUR times shows a serious intellectual deficit. Lisa Murkowski is a dim bulb. Those are the facts.
Failing the bar exam once is a disgrace and would be embarrassing. Anyone who takes a bar review course and studies reasonably hard should be able to pass it on the first try.
By the way, bringing Sarah Palin into the equation tell everyone what your agenda is.
Also, no one really cares that you say you passed the bar exam on the first try. No one on this board is comparing resumes with you. The New York State Bar is only two days and has a pass rate in the 80s among first time takers. It is far from the toughest bar exam the country. Try taking a bar exam that lasts three days or better yet, try taking (and passing) one that lasts three CONSECUTIVE days where the pass rate is 39% (without the bar review course) and then come back and give us your expert opinion on what a difficult test it is.
“...I would say that it’s not unheard of for a smart person to have to take the bar multiple times to pass. It IS unheard of for a smart person to take seven years to complete college if they are going full-time.
So I would have to say that you have to be infinitely dumber to take seven years to go through college (assuming you are a full-time student for those seven years, which I assume Palin was not), than to take the bar five times.”
—So, by your logic, people who don’t even graduate from college must be REALLY dumb...
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Rush Limbaugh...
Whack! It’s always “Sarah.”
“So, by your logic, people who don’t even graduate from college must be REALLY dumb...”
What logic? With logic like that, how did he pass even the New York Bar with its 85% plus pass rate?
There are approximately 1.2 million lawyers in the U.S. as of 2007. I would be willing to bet that not 250 of them failed the bar exam four times. But one of the few dim bulbs who holds this ignominious distinction was handed a Senate seat by daddy and wants to keep it.
Swapping Lisa Murkowski for Joe Miller is like trading Bob Ueker for Ted Williams. The intellectual wattage of the U.S. Senate will improve from 40 to 100 just in virtue of this event.
I realize there is not record of revocation of his license. That does not prove that inactivity was a result of an innocuous act. He voluntarily surrendered his law license - so did slick willy and lots of other crook lawyers.
Will Shakespeare had it right even in jest about lawyers.
That actually doesn’t follow from my logic at all. I explicitly predicated my comment on one taking seven years of full-time study to get through college. I don’t believe any of Rush, Gates, or Jobs even hung around for four.
Of course that line was uttered by one of the villains in Henry Six...
I didn’t bring Sarah Palin into the equation; the poster to whom I was responding did. In my response, I TOOK SARAH PALIN’S SIDE — I said I doubted Sarah Palin actually spent 7 years in full-time study. (And I just looked it up — she did NOT study full-time for 7 years. She studied for 8 semesters, which equals the normal time to graduate — 4 years of full time, study. The only oddity is that she did it at 4 different colleges)
And if you were as great at reading comprehension as you are at tossing insults, you would have noticed that I said FULL-TIME study. The vast majority of those who are working their way through school, which I assume includes Sarah Palin, generally do not study FULL-TIME, for which colleges usually require a minimum of 12 to 15 credits per semester and 2 full-time semesters per year.
So I stand by my statement. If it takes someone 7 years to get through college while studying FULL-TIME, that means they have failed or withdrawn from enough classes to comprise three full years of full-time study (or, mathematically, failed nearly half of their classes), which, given what goes on in American colleges today, makes someone pretty damn dumb.
True-—but Shakespeare’s corpus is replete with many references to the guiles and tricks of lawyers- an extensive one here -
HAMLET.
There’s another: why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddits now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? why does he suffer this rude knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel, and will not tell him of his action of battery? Hum! This fellow might be in’s time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries: is this the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt? will his vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases, and double ones too, than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures? The very conveyances of his lands will hardly lie in this box; and must the inheritor himself have no more, ha?
“That actually doesn’t follow from my logic at all. I explicitly predicated my comment on one taking seven years of full-time study to get through college. I don’t believe any of Rush, Gates, or Jobs even hung around for four.”
—If your argument is that someone is supposedly unintelligent because it took him or her seven years to graduate, then yes, it would logically follow that an individual who *couldn’t even finish* college would be less intelligent (or at least, as unintelligent). The individual who took seven years at least has a degree...the dropout doesn’t.
Btw, I know a lot of bright people (including some engineers) who went full-time, and changed majors a bunch of times and had to go back to the starting block, or ran into money woes (because their daddy wasn’t footing the bill for them...), etc., and it took a *long* time for them to finally graduate.
My argument is that someone is unintelligent because they fail half their classes if they’re going full-time for seven years.
Yes, some change majors — but so many times that they are around for 7 years? They’d have to change majors in senior year, and from engineering to acting or some such. And changing majors from engineering to acting DEFINITELY makes them stupid. :-)
There is a big difference between failing and transferring, and staying out of school some semesters...which, I believe, is why it took Sarah longer.
You make an amazing number of assumptions. I guess lawyers can afford to do that since they get paid whether their clients go to prison or not. I was a carpenter. We can’t afford to make many assumptions at all. Unless we’re building a lawyer’s house.
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