Free Republic

In his 19 years as a law professor at UCLA, Richard Sander has pondered a nagging question: Does affirmative action help or hinder African Americans who want to become lawyers? Two years ago, he published research suggesting that racial preferences at law firms might be responsible for black lawyers' high rate of attrition and difficulty making partner. He hypothesized that in the interest of promoting diversity, law firms sometimes hired black lawyers who were underqualified, and that when there was a "credentials gap" between black and white lawyers at a firm, black lawyers often were less likely to advance and...

BOSTON, Massachusetts, July 3, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A man who was given a failing grade on the Massachusetts bar exam has filed a complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief and damages and is demanding a jury trial, claiming that he failed the exam after refusing to answer an inappropriate question on homosexual marriage. Besides requesting that bar examiners do not consider the offending question when grading his exam, however, Dunne is also challenging the very constitutionality of the homosexual "marriage" laws in the state of Massachusetts. In the list of defendants Dunne includes the Supreme Judicial Court and the individual Justices. In...

If George W. Bush had gone to law school and later flunked the bar exam, you can imagine that fact would have become a virtual part of his name in the MSM, as in "George Bush, who failed the bar exam, today criticized a law that . . ." But it came as news to me when Carl Bernstein mentioned on this morning's "Today" that Hillary flunked the Washington, DC bar exam back in the '70s. OK, I'm not the most knowledegable guy, and the fact of Hillary's failure is not news -- after years of hiding the embarrassment, she...

   Lowering The Bar January 5, 2006 Clifton Eames has been reading too much of René Descartes.  When Eames flunked the Texas bar exam four times in a row, he reacted although, “...there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me....”  Perhaps he is just a bit too obsessed by his belief in “Cogito ergo sum”. The State Bar of Texas has a rule which limits the number of times an individual can take the bar exam to five.  If you flunk all five times, that is the end of any ambitions to practice...

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times The final hurdle: Many more blacks than whites fail to pass the bar examination. ONE would have thought, given the decades of ardent debate over affirmative action in higher education, that the main axes of the dispute had been established. Defenders of racial preferences say that they compensate for historical wrongs, ensure vibrant and varied campus discourse and help create minority role models and leaders. Opponents say preferences are nothing but a reverse form of discrimination that stereotypes and stigmatizes minority students. But a recent study published in The Stanford Law Review by Richard...

After failing the New York state bar exam five times, Marilyn Bartlett is considering a sixth attempt, now that the long-running matter of Bartlett v. New York State Board of Law Examiners has been settled in her favor. Bartlett, whose reading ability is severely impaired by dyslexia, will be granted twice the ordinary two days' time to complete the bar exam, if she takes it again.