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Comment by s0kr8s | Hacker News Reader

A lot of recent "ditch the exam" efforts across a wide variety of professions seem to be centered around post-2020 diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives (evidence: https://www.opb.org/article/2022/01/17/oregon-advances-alter...).

This is not always stated explicitly, but will turn up in board minutes if you have access to them. Many professional boards have added a DEI committee or incorporated language into their mission statement in recent years as well (Oregon bar statement: https://www.osbar.org/diversity/programs.html).

I'm never clear whether the hypothesis is "more DEI = more efficacy && competency," or whether the hypothesis is "benefits of (DEI) > benefits of (efficacy && competency)." The former hypothesis at least seems more testable, but I'm not sure whether anyone is trying very hard (meta-analysis: https://academic.oup.com/tbm/advance-article/doi/10.1093/tbm...).

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Oregon's move is exactly backwards. If anything, they should cancel the law school requirement and allow the public to sit for the bar exam. Schools are notorious for graduating incompetent students who's only ability was to take out loans to pay the tuition. Allowing the public to sit for the bar exam without going to law school would be a much better DEI initiative because it would directly address disparities in the ability to finance a law school education.

Also law school is ridiculous. My sister is studying to be a lawyer but may not be able to attend despite passing the initial test (the name I forget.) basically she needs a couple of existing lawyers recommendation, but we’re from a small town and she only knows one. Also the work requirements are ridiculous, she’s not allowed to work for a law office at all while attending a law school which seems so backwards compared to most schools where they actively encourage getting a job working in the field. So she’ll have to quit her current law secretary job if she wants to go to law school.

Are you in the US? Created an account to address this misconception in case it’ll help your sister out:

Assuming she hasn’t attended yet (and therefore just took the LSAT, not the bar exam), most schools will accept letters of recommendation from anybody that can speak to your sister’s ability to succeed in law school. That can be her current employer, past employers, colleagues, past professors, community members she’s volunteered with, etc. If she can’t find literally anybody, she might be able to network with local attorneys to get a basic letter to help her meet requirements.

And law students complete internships whilst they’re in school, not sure who told her she couldn’t work for a firm during her studies. However, many schools do have a rule against allowing 1L (first-year) students to work as it could interfere with their studies. I agree that it sucks when you’re not already wealthy, though. She could see if the firm she currently works at would allow her to go on leave, coming back as an intern after her first year. Alternatively, she could do a part-time program.

Disclaimer: I’m also applying to law school this cycle, so actual lawyers may have better info.

You can work, but you can't get paid for said work unless it's during a school break. At least that was ABA rules around ten years ago, and followed assiduously by everyone from private practitioners to the federal government. Nobody will hire you when you study for the bar (although if you apply outside of the legal field, you can. I worked in a kitchen when I studied for the bar). Although you'll have to have a body of work in order to get someone to pay you anyway, so if you're not the type who'd go from law review to big law or teaching, you can rack up a lot more hours if you're willing to do the unpaid busywork that comes with, say, the Public Defender's office, or the Prosecutor's Office. Internship + externship + paid work added together with a summer's head start I managed to cram in almost 3000 hours before I took the bar and had a job waiting for me right away, but please don't do that, because you'll get burned out really quickly and possibly become very jaded about the work. I spent one spring doing only juvenile cases and it totally fucked me up. And this was after I had worked on two capital cases (neither got the death penalty, thankfully), and in the early days of Facebook I scraped the personal details of residents of two counties for peremptory challenges during voir dire (hung jury, both murder cases). I don't think anyone in my class came even close to how much work I put in. I practiced for 6 years and then quit.

This makes so much sense that it's nearly indefensible that this isn't how it is.

Possible in 4 states today: https://www.juriseducation.com/blog/can-you-take-the-bar-exa...

I believe all four of the states that don't require law school instead require a substantially equivalent period of supervised apprenticeship with a licensed attorney to qualify for the bar if you choose not to go the law school route (California does), so its inaccurate to point to them as examples of the “allow the public to sit for the bar” recommendation upthread.

The reason for DEI does not matter. The practical outcome is perhaps perverse.

A potential client will see a "diverse" lawyer and think "this person was hired because of DEI rather than competence."

Prudent clients will insist on white male lawyers because they must be competent to have jobs in a DEI environment. So actually competent lawyers from minorities suffer because of DEI policies and laws.

The ordinary client does not know how to properly evaluate the competency of an attorney anyway, DEI or not DEI. And no, the jingle is not correlated to performance either in motion or trial practice. Hell, Cellino and Barnes literally had a new Barnes and kept the jingle and nobody even seemed to notice.

Not sure if the ditch the exam here is related to that, since there’s a lot of pre-existing discourse around exam practices anyways, but

> I'm never clear whether the hypothesis is … or …

It’s possibly both. I’ve seen a lot of arguments (poorly cited usually) to the affect of

* diverse organizations tend to perform better. The general claim is that providing psychological safety enables people to work better. And diverse groups of people have more different experiences, and can contribute increasingly different ideas and perspectives.

* DEI initiatives are beneficial people and society at large. This claim is obvious.

So it can be true that the benefits of these initiatives are important AND they lead to better performing organizations.

People who are granted access to opportunities based on DEI and not on merit will be forever indebted to the DEI power structure and will aid them in their long march through the institutions by loyally doing whatever it takes to increase and ensure their political power. They claim that their is a conspiracy against DEI and they are just rebalancing the scale and this is why there are different scores on standardized tests, etc. They say the only way for you to get justice is to give political power to the DEI hierarchy and ignore their crimes and corruption and prosecute to the maximum extent those who want to do things based on merit.

You need a definition of merit and an understanding of when it matters and to whom.

Your score on a multiple-choice exam, testing basic concepts about the law seems like a pretty good definition of merit here.

If only that was the bar exam. Now it's all UBE so what you end up with is 2/3 multiple choice questions that bear little relationship to actual law you'll be practicing, and 1/3 are answers to absurd hypotheticals that you'd answer in a formulaic fashion, situations that you will pretty much never see IRL and certainly will never be in a position where you can't look up the law, except this one time.

Oh, and the software that's used to conduct the test is practically malware in the way it operates. At the NY State Bar exam I took there were about 100 people who didn't finish because the crappy software crashed and you had to handwrite the whole thing from the first question on. If it crashes your computer, you might as well leave since you won't have time to finish.

Really, the bar exam has virtually nothing in common with the actual practice of law. It's a separate skill, like taking the SATs. Although, there are so many legal niches that it's unlikely that testing real law would really resemble how legal practicecs work today anyway. It's pretty much an arbitrary test that might fry your computer. Hopefully they at least they should have released a newer version of the software in the intervening years.

It's just a means of assembling a very large clique of underqualified people, who everyone knows are underqualified and who know they are underqualified who will, in the name of job security and gratitude and whatever fake intellectual "justice" sophistry the PHDs in whatever studies come up with, will willingly participate in and ignore political corruption and call it "justice" and persecute anyone trying to clean it up. This model has been replicated among many big cities in America that demand "diversity." Over time in the name of "social justice", a whole cadre of underqualified civil servants lining their pockets and waving whatever flag of the month protects them from any scrutiny at all milk to death the historical wealth of cities and slowly turn them into Detroit. All the productive people give up on and move out of the cities. The tax revenue falls, cities services decline, lots of buildings become derelict and burn down, and everyone cheers about how "diverse" they are.

In cities that just won't die like San Francisco, they spend $300 million dollars on a homeless problem that would put thousands of diversity hires out of a job if it was ever solved. They do a subway expansion that costs more than $1 billion dollars for a mile, and they demand more taxes to fix problems that could be solved by simply enforcing the existing laws.

And conversely, anyone who has been granted opportunity due to suppressing the opportunities of others despite merit will do whatever it takes to maintain their political power.

Source: the entire civil rights movement going all the way back to slavery

I agree that it could certainly be both.

However, most professional boards are created with an explicit mandate to promote efficacy and competency, which makes a hypothesis like "benefits of (DEI) > benefits of (efficacy && competency)" rather troublesome for a professional board to rally around. Even if true, it seems out of scope.

The "more DEI = more efficiency && competency" hypothesis seem like it should be where a professional board should focus its efforts and messaging instead.

There is an interesting hypothesis by Oded Galor that states that there should be a balance between not enough and too much diversity when it comes to innovation and progress - with the first you'll get stagnation and with the second you'll get chaos.

I read the OPB article and it mentions DEI at the end, in a way that suggests that this change did not come as a result of DEI.

It’s based on the absurd idea that multiple choice tests are racist and so what you need is subjective human grading.

Yeah, DEI considerations abolishing bar exams is an example of a good result for the wrong reason, IMO.

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