This is an incredible story. Kathleen Sullivan, former dean of Stanford Law School and one of the biggest names in legal scholarship, just failed the California bar exam. That's causing no end of snickering around the blogosphere, but apparently the California exam is considered the toughest in the nation and it's not unusual to fail it. Still, you certainly don't expect a scholar of Sullivan's eminence to do so.
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It's been almost 20 years since I took a bar exam; I sure wouldn't want to take another one. Sheer torture. I certainly don't think less of Sullivan, but it does raise the question: why was she taking a bar exam in the first place?
I was curious about that myself. Anyway, at the end of the day, the bar exam is an endurance contest. It has much less to do with your intelligence or grasp of the law, because, to be honest, any reasonably bright 16 year old could pass the test if she took an intensive review course.
The New York bar takes about 12.5 hours over two days. The Cal bar, from what I've heard, is a three-day affair. I was so burnt by the end of the second day in NY, I can only imagine the sheer apathy I'd have had to overcome going into a third.
If I hadn't passed the first time, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have taken it again.
"why was she taking a bar exam in the first place?" Maybe she lost a bet with Ed on the Duke - Penn basketball game and the loser had the choice of taking the California Bar Exam or going to a Celine Dion concert. Of course she picked the lesser of two evils.
Dan wrote:
She's now in private practice. She just joined an appellate firm in Southern California, apparently. I guess she decided it was time to make some serious cash.
jcw wrote:
HA! The way the Blue Devils have played so far this year, I wouldn't bet something as heinous as having to go to a Celine Dion concert on them beating even an Ivy League team.
Haha, Sullivan wrote my wife's ConLaw book.
It's strange that she failed the CA bar exam. Was she too ignorant to take a bar review course? It's not unheard of for a person who is a specialist in one area to get weak in other areas, but it is one purpose of a bar review course to bring the student up to speed in all areas.
BTW, if memory serves, bar exams in more than a few states have expanded to three days. The third day is largely an ethics exam.
I also wonder why Sullivan was taking a bar exam. I would have presumed that she would have passed a bar exam in at least one state after she (presumably) graduated from law school. It is usual that, if she had maintained her bar membership, she could merely "transfer into" a bar membership in another state without having to take the bar exam in the other state. I've done that several times.
Haha, Sullivan wrote my wife's ConLaw book.
It is doubtful that she wrote it all herself. After doing a bit of checking over the Internet, it appears likely that she updated Gerald Gunther's ConLaw textbook. Gunther himself updated Noel Dowling's earlier ConLaw textbook. I used Gunther&Dowling when I took ConLaw in 1971-72.
I should note that this updating of legal texts is not unusual.
In New York, the ethics portion of the exam is given separately. It's pretty easy, actually.
When I took my degree in Oceanography there was a set of 4 3-hour exams to be taken over 2 days called the comprehensives, or 'comps'. They covered marine biology, chemistry, physics and geology, and were the same regardless of your specialty.
Comprehensive meant comprehensive, and you were expected to provide minute detail, both for class material and whatever the hot topics were in the journals at that time. Pass mark was 70, although if you scored 65-69 on one test, you would still pass if your overall average was 75 or more. Failure on one test meant failure of them all.
I'll wager not one of the faculty could have passed those tests without extensive background prep.