Curious About What the Bar Exam Will Look like in 2026?

You can get a sense of what it will look like here.  Contracts coverage is specified on pages 16-20.  I don’t see very many surprises here.   Comparing the topics now covered to my syllabus, I would only need to make sure to discuss the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act, but I cover that in Sales, so perhaps that suffices.  Joshua Silverstein, who shared the document with the Contracts Listserv, points out that the exam designers have removed “indefiniteness and absence of terms” from the list of topics covered, but the outline does have a section on ambiguity and omitted or implied terms. Will “ambiguity” be stretched to entail all indefiniteness?  What of inchoate agreements like letters of intent or memoranda of understanding?  

I may be reading too much into this, but perhaps the outline provides hints of the way the examiners think about particular topics.  For example, I teach students that the statute of frauds is broad but has lots of exceptions.  By contrast, the parol evidence rule is narrow, and it is best just to learn the very limited scenarios it covers rather than learn all the things that it doesn’t cover.  I have come to accept that my approach is not very effective, as even I talk about exceptions for misrepresentation or conditions.  I try to train my students to say things like, because this relates to interpretive issues, the parol evidence rule does not apply.  But they mostly still think in terms of exceptions.  Perhaps it would be more helpful to my students to talk about the parol evidence rule the way the bar does, with a short list of prominent exceptions and then a list of discrete areas where there is a “difference of application” relating to evidence proffered to “supplement, explain, or contradict” a written agreement.

Every year, as the bar exam approaches, I get students asking me about practice bar questions about accord and satisfaction, a subject I do not cover in the first-year course.  Now I note a section devoted to “discharge of duties: accord and satisfaction, substituted contract, novation, rescission, and release.”  I will have to chat with Steven Foster, our Director of Academic Achievement to see what I can do to forestall such puzzlement in the future.