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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

This is backward. They should eliminate the law school requirement and let people be lawyers with just the bar exam.

One of my frustrations with professional licensing (beyond being intentionally protectionist) is that it requires X number of hours in a seat, not really demonstrated competence. This slows down market response to increasing demand (I can't find an electrician in my area).

A very involved exam stretching over multiple days would be much faster and more likely to achieve the stated purpose of licensing competent people.

Actual conversation from a few years ago:

"You are not certified to use this obscure electrical diagnostics tool, I have to do it for you."

"Hey, cool, I helped write the firmware for this tool. Let me show you an undocumented command."

"You are not certified to use this obscure electrical diagnostics tool, I have to do it for you."

"Type this command number in, it thinks you're saying thank-you to it, and it will print You're Welcome".

The guy types it in, it prints YOU'RE WELCOME. I ask if he wants to know anything about this tool from one of the developers.

"You are not certified to use this obscure electrical diagnostics tool, I have to do it for you."

It was a very embarassing interaction.

Were you a guest at some other site? If so, the other person following their policy is a pretty reasonable explanation for your story. The policy isn't going to have an exception for them where they can evaluate your competency outside the established practice at the site.

I agree it's kind of weird if it were just a personal interaction with no surrounding context.

We were both at a customer site. I was called in because at the time my job was "The regular technician can't deal with this, we will send an engineer". The whole job was about a hydropump barge.

One might argue that time in a seat doing a job under the supervision of a licensed professional, without getting fired, is a good demonstration of competence - and has the added bonus of the student getting paid for their time while learning. Apprenticeships can be beneficial to everyone involved and have the added bonus of supporting social mobility.

Unless your job is just to get coffee for someone at minimum wage.

You can’t guarantee what someone’s job is day to day, and what they get to learn, at scale. Also the pay is terrible at most of these jobs, and significantly raises the cost to enter the field.

Apprenticeships are different from gopher internships.

Society has used the apprenticeship system to pass down specialized knowledge for thousands of years; it seems to work reasonably well.

Agreed and think this definitely applies to software. Most CS students would be better off in an apprenticeship learning under multiple skilled developers rather than 4 years of school.

I learned 10 as much my first year than in 4 years of school combined.

I would love to study on my own, take an exam, and be qualified to do electrical work on my own house. The only thing stopping me from attempting is the hour requirement.

I kinda see the point, practice is important. But I'm not about to transition careers and work as an apprentice at this stage in life.

In many US states, you can already do electrical work on your own home without a professional certificate as long as it's done to code and inspected.

Or as a sibling of mine did recently. Electrician didn't have time to do the work so sibling did the work and electrician reviewed on completion (when he was back from vacation) for a nominal fee. Electrician noted the work was meticulous, in fact better than any of his assistants. Several things to note, siblings meticulous work also applies to day job as developer, it probably took longer than the electricians assistants would take and finally you could say the electrician 'approved and merged the PR'.

Or if nobody notices.

Practice is important, but mostly for speed. If you could pay me minimum wage or a master normal prices to do electric work, you are money ahead paying the master even though the quality of work is the same in the end. I've done enough electric to know how to do pretty much anything, but it will take me much longer as I don't know all the shortcuts, I'll spend more time going to find the right tools (which would be in the belt of the master). I won't think that an outlet also needs a.cover and so be back to the store several times.

In the end either way the job is done right, but I know how much slower I am. I could get faster with experience, but it isn't worth my time.

My state allows homeowners to do electrical work if they have it inspected. In practice, homeowners are terrible electricians and typically fail multiple inspections before finally passing.

Certain jurisdictions do allow you to do electrical work without a license if you're the property owner.

This program requires a short apprenticeship and the submission of a body of work to the bar in lieu of the exam. This sounds reasonable to me (though the 675 hours sounds low - I would have expected 1 year of experience or more).

Virginia is one of two(?) states that allow an apprenticeship ("reading the law") to replace law school. But the bar exam is still required. And the pass rate here is much lower than law school graduates.

Talking to friends who have taken the bar exam, it excels at testing, among other things, attention to detail - a scenario that "is clearly X" at first read is actually nuanced and the answer is completely different. I don't personally believe that any single other skill is more important to being an effective lawyer, and do not believe that a short apprenticeship or submission of "body of work" is any sort of substitute.

Will there be some people who can be effective lawyers without passing the bar? Probably - in the sense that there are some people who can be effective software engineers coming out of a coding bootcamp. That doesn't mean that 95% aren't incompetent people looking to make a quick buck.

> I don't personally believe that any single other skill is more important to being an effective lawyer

I’ll posit one more: a holistic intuition of how the law “works”. The law is unfathomably large. As a lawyer, you have to make numerous decisions that involve novel circumstances or that you simply don’t have the opportunity to research beforehand. So you need to base a surprising number of decisions on instinct, experience, or derivation from first principles.

Four states allow you to take the bar exam without attending law school: California, Vermont, Virginia, Washington. The various requirements differ. California requires two years of college, Virginia requires a bachelor's degree. Vermont takes four years, California takes five years.

Is the pass rate being low, bad? Couldn't it just imply more people attempt it?

The pass rate for law readers (apprentices) is lower than those who completed law school (20% pass rate vs 80%).

The law reader program requires an undergraduate degree and 3 years of apprenticeship under a supervising attorney, so it doesn't save time vs law school. It only saves money.

A small number of people undertake and complete the law reader program in VA. Likely because it's not viewed as a good value - if you complete law school, but fail the bar, at least you still have a post-graduate degree (that's generally viewed favorably in general).

But, IANAL or expert in this program, just interesting the different options to get into a law practice.

> if you complete law school, but fail the bar, at least you still have a post-graduate degree (that's generally viewed favorably in general).

For folks who don't know, lawyers really like JDs, to the point that if you want to be a recruiter for lawyers, you probably need a JD. If you want to be a career counselor at a law school, you probably need a JD.

They can be this choosy because there's enough people with a JD who don't want to be a lawyer or can't hack it as one.

More than a good chance the law readers are doing it alongside a full or part time job, while law school students are fully invested in terms of time and lots of money.

That's possible.

From the program rules... "Each calendar year shall consist of at least 40 weeks, with a minimum of 25 hours of study each week..."

> 675 hours sounds low - I would have expected 1 year of experience

Doing the unit conversion for everyone else: that's 17 versus 48 workweeks, assuming 40 hours/week in both cases.

Any professional program instills way more than just knowledge to pass a test. The fact that you survived long enough to pass the test is often a big part of the test's function. The graded practice thing is actually even more intimidating. Not only do you have to do well, you have to do well live in front of people, and you have to have had the requisite experience in those hours of practice to get an adequate portfolio together. This portfolio development component can be brutally harder than all the tests combined.

If you've practiced for a decade in one state, and then you moved to another state without reciprocity (many permutations) and want to work, suddenly you have to sit again. That's a very different headspace. This "supervised work" is a good option in this scenario.

That's the same for doctors. My wife and I moved to a state without reciprocity. One of the local requirements was to have passed the board qualification exams -- the ones you take as a med school senior as part of applying to residencies -- within the last 10 years. Doesn't matter if you've been practicing for 25 years, or even teaching in a med school: you're taking the test again. My wife's the genius of our family and passed it the first time through. I'm glad I work in an industry where I don't have to ever take and pass my college exams again.

> Any professional program instills way more than just knowledge to pass a test.

If you talk to someone for thirty minutes about the same subfield as you do, you can definitely tell whether they know it. Mass testing on paper is harder because of cheating (even if only a small minority does it, it defeats the purpose). It's orders of magnitude cheaper to have a good test, one-on-one if need be, as compared to hiring all the teachers necessary to give everyone a standardized education.

I've learned very little in my master's. Call me the problem for already knowing most concepts and just having to learn-by-heart some protocol byte offsets (yes, that was actually asked on a closed-book test), but a year of memorization of some specific things is and getting a certificate for that is far less valuable/actionable than making sure someone can do the actual job and giving a certificate for that. Yet the former certificate is what most companies base starting pay grade on, or for being considered at all, no matter what they claim before you get to HR.

(Edited the number in first response line from hyperbole to actual estimate. Also loving that people are downvoting reality they, I guess, don't like? Or what's the problem?)

Then test EVERYTHING one should know

How do you propose testing real world ethics in a controlled environment?

Ethics is two parts. What is the expected ethical decision to make for a lawyer, and actually following through with the ethical behavior.

A test can easily test the former, and schooling doesn't do anything to test the latter.

From what I understand, the law school requirement is more useful than the bar exam. To use a CS analogy, the bar exam would involve questions like "write a Sieve of Eratosthenes using PDP-11 assembler," and you're expected to have the PDP-11 assembly manual fully memorized to be able to take it.

No. The bar exam is an outdated, gatekeeping, hazing mechanism that requires rote memorization and application of blackletter law and is altogether unrelated to the practice of law.

However, it wouldn't hurt to shorten law school from three to two years. The third year is a waste.

This exists in some states... sorta.

I have a friend in WA that has been a paralegal for over a decade who is currently going through the process. In most states you are not allowed to take the bar unless you have a law degree, but in WA, CA, I'm sure others, you can take the bar after studying under a lawyer for X hours (not sure the number, but its a lot).

Agreed.

Lincoln was one of the famous lawyers that never attended law school:

https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/lincoln-admitted-to-p...

Every lawyer attending law school is a relatively new phenomenon although law schools have been around in the US since 1817. Previously, many might apprentice, then take a bar exam. Justice Robert Jackson, one of our greatest SCOTUS justices and a personal favorite, was the last SCOTUS justice not to attend the standard 3 years of law school.

However IMHO there are plenty of attorneys, perhaps too many, and de-professionalizing the practice of law, at this moment in time, will not be a good thing for judges, other attorneys, and the administration of justice.

But read carefully what Oregon is doing:

> After law school, candidates will spend 675 hours working under the supervision of an experienced attorney and create a portfolio of legal work that bar officials will grade as an alternative to the traditional bar exam.

I think this policy gets the problem backwards. Kids are actually spending too much time and money in law school. The preparation and sitting for a grueling 2-3 day exam more closely approximates one aspect of the profession, than yet another year of law school. I'd be more pleased if we re-adopted the apprenticeship model, as an alternative to some law school, and reduced the traditional law school curriculum to 2 years.

They should eliminate the license altogether and get out of the business of deciding who can practice law.

Professional licensing is generally a scam that allows people in a trade to control competition among other things. Under color of government it’s given the veneer of “protecting the public” but in reality it’s protectionist and also used to punish people who don’t think or act like the licensing organization prefers.

No, that’s exactly what they want to prevent: pissants who game the exam and then go on to practice law.

If you’ve done law school, that should be good enough. No need to pin everything on one exam.

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