Bar Prep Teaching

This year, I am teaching a bar preparation course on contracts, which is being offered for the first time at my Law School.  This is a lot of fun for me — I like teaching contracts both semesters because it keeps my mind more focused on the subject.  It’s also fun to teach the material in a different way — no cases, as some familiarity with the case law is assumed at this point, so I just give mini refresher lectures and then move on to the homework assignment.

So it’s fun, but it’s also a lot of work.  I give my students four multiple choice questions each day, and they have to turn in their answers — explaining why the right answer is wrong and the wrong answers are wrong.  The idea is to both solidify their understanding of the doctrine and alert them to the strategy behind bar exam “distractors” — that is, wrong answers that are trying to trick students into mistaking them for correct answers.  Most days, they also have to write a short essay, designed to be akin to MEE questions.  

Because I am teaching such a course myself, I read with some interest David Frakt’s recent post on The Faculty Lounge on the value of in-house bar prep courses.  But I was taken aback by the comments.  The anonymous or pseudonymous commentators asked the following rhetorical questions:

• Does bar prep make students better lawyers?
• What good is passing the bar when there are no jobs for lawyers anyway?
• Don’t law schools have an obligation to refrain from flooding the market with unemployable lawyers?

I think this is a case of massive anger that is massively misdirected.  Students are in law school.  They want to stay in law school and they want to become lawyers.  I have met with many students facing dismissal from my Law School for poor academic performance.  The ones I have spoken to all are willing to do whatever it takes to stay in, and they are furious with us when we dismiss them.  So we put the time and the energy into bar prep courses because it is what our students need.  Some of them need it because they won’t do the work without the additional kick in the pants.  Others need it because they have many natural gifts that will make them great lawyers, but excelling at standardized tests is not one of them.  We are trying to get them over that hurdle so that they can have the careers for which they are otherwise qualified.

I certainly understand the anger of the unemployed law students.  I was an unemployed Ph.D. before I went to law school.  I know what professional devastation feels like.  It seems like the “Law School Scam” crowd thinks the solution is to just shut law schools like the one I teach at.  But how would throwing me, my colleagues, and our support staff out of work improve the situation?  It certainly would not improve things for the students we serve, most of whom pass the bar, find work, and do better than they would have done without their degrees.  Law school opened for me a range of career options that would have been completely unthinkable without my J.D.  Why should that opportunity be denied to the current generation of potential law students?