Am I about to write about this just for the click-bait possibilities? Probably.
Does that make the underlying topic less worth discussing? I hope not.
So there used to be a time when people could become lawyers without ever having to go to law school. You could effectively apprentice in the law where you could work for and study with (through working for mostly) a practicing lawyer and then be able to sit for a bar examination and, if you passed, then become licensed to practice.
At some level, that sort of model makes some sense if you believe the ultimate goal of a legal education is for someone to be able to actually practice law at the end of their professional education.
In fact, many voices of criticism of modern law school education tend to focus on how disconnected it can be from teaching people how to actually practice law.
The flip side of course is that law school does a very fine job of teaching people how to think like a lawyer — a skill that readily translates to the ability to practice a variety of kinds of law. Whereas the idea of apprenticing into the practice of law may be more limited in that if you apprentice for a probate litigator you likely will learn how to be a good probate litigator but you might not learn that in a way that would translate into practicing some other type of law.
What you might not know (and I certainly didn’t before today) is that you can still apprentice into the law in California. I learned this from today’s news over at Above the Law that Kim Kardashian (you may have heard of her) is pursuing that path to becoming a California lawyer.
Mulling all of that over has returned me to a thought that I kick around from time-to-time from admittedly a different perspective but that is certainly related.
If successfully attending law school and passing the bar exam actually do each have real meaning such that both have to be required to practice law, then why shouldn’t (other than character and fitness requirements as an additional piece of the puzzle) the logical consequence of that be that anyone who has managed to do that to be able to practice law in at least one state, then be considered sufficiently qualified to be able to then at least apply to be admitted in any other state without having to jump through lots of procedural hoops? (For today, I’m not even going to go the step further that might also be a legitimate question if we really want to get contemplative.)
Quite a lot of states are pretty flexible in their procedures for letting folks already licensed in one jurisdiction “waive in” to get a license in that jurisdictions without having to take another bar exam. Some states are still pretty parochial in their approach – particularly states that have a good bit of beach front property.