The bar exam and law school have different purposes. A law school teaches the laws of the entire country. A bar exam tests the law of the specific state. While many laws are similar, they're not the same, and the differences matter a great deal.
And secondly, a great many people can eek their way through law school who have no business actually practicing law, and the bar exam is essentially the last filter keeping those incompetents away from the practice of law before they can harm clients. (The law provides recourse to clients when a lawyer's actions deliberately harms clients, however, there is little to no recourse for clients if their lawyer makes a mistake.)
This was true 10 years ago. Now the majority of states use the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE), often without a jurisdiction-specific component. It's unfortunate.
I agree with the rest of your comment though.
The costs by themselves are also shocking to be fair. Here the full four years of a law degree allowing you to pass the bar would only set you back 753€ to which you would probably have to add a year of preparation and the cost of the exam itself which probably bring you to somewhere between 2000€ and 4000€ for the academic part of actually becoming a lawyer.
Why is everyone trying to erode society down to like, nothingness?
Burger flipper to 400k/year lawyer anyone?
Yes, I can. And, frankly, it sucks.
I don't do my own roofing. The idea that I would have to argue my own case in court sounds horrible. I don't know how. And then the people who right now are (or become) lawyers would just use their superior system knowledge to extort others. Far better that the responses available to a claim of some tort are "I guess I should call a lawyer" and not "I guess I should pay $5,000 for this to go away or spend the next 2 years learning the law to fight it on my own."
Someone who could pass the bar exam, and could end up being a great lawyer isn't even given the chance, because they can't afford to attend law school (which is necessary to take the exam, from what I gather, but IANAL & I'm not from the US).
Now, are people who could pass the bar exam and be merely a “good” or “acceptable” lawyer being frozen out by the wealth barrier? Absolutely. But actually probably not: these people can go to a lower tier and cheaper school.
This is true at the richest levels. If you are willing to write a multi-million dollar check as a donation (name a building/room after your family), you will probably be admitted. In 1999, apparently a $2.5 million donation secured Jared Kushner's admittance into Harvard. This has to be adjusted not just by regular admission but also by the increased competition (it is more than twice as competitive). So I would expect we might be getting closer to a $10 million donation. Although schools would probably cap it/auction it off if they got too many donations.
This is by far the minority of admissions.
Other cases where people "pay to get in" are literally bribes, and people can and have gone to jail.
> There's the scholarship programs, but I was also under the impression they're often through sports rather than grades
There are a lot of scholarship types: academic, need-based, interest based (an engineering may spend money to help aspiring engineers), corporate (we'll pay your tuition if you work here for 2 years after), and athletic. Not all schools offer all types, and some (like interest based scholarships) are unaffiliated with any school (although athletic scholarships are).
Also, athletic scholarships are limited to your undergraduate (pre-law or pre-med or your BA/BS in X).
In all cases, the scholarships help you pay for school, but tend to be different from the actual admittance process. So the correlation would be between someone good at Football and someone who can afford school. Which, if you think about it as a job (they make the school a ton of money) is fair in a way.
Generally switching schools requires a year off, but there are some loop holes by applying to a grad major that is not present in the original school. Basketball and football players seem to use these often. You can google for more information, and I believe it still wouldn't work for law/doctor programs, but I haven't looked into this.
Are you saying that a "burger flipper" should always be one and never aspire to eventually be a lawyer?
I just want there to be many paths to learning. Formal schooling. Apprenticeship. Private mentoring. Hell, you could probably get a series of YouTube channels (with a very low success rate) or something closer to a MOOC.
Obviously, you need to demonstrate you learned from those paths. And I wondered if the bar exam was sufficient to show that. So I asked someone who claimed to be a lawyer on the internet as I don't know how sufficient the bar is as a measure.