My attention was recently drawn to a headline declaring that Washington, the state I grew up in, would no longer require aspiring lawyers to pass the bar exam in order to become practicing lawyers. I did a bit of reading on the subject and it turns out this decision was motivated by DEI concerns:
During a September presentation before the Washington State Bar Association Board of Governors, Washington Supreme Court Justice Raquel Montoya-Lewis, one of the chairs of the Bar Licensure Task Force, said the movement comes in part “from law students who have raised issues about equity, not just in the history of the adoption of the bar exam, but also over the course of many decades, when you look at the disproportionate impacts that the bar exam has on examinees of color.”
She went on to note, “They tend to fail the bar exam in disproportionate numbers.”
Now, this might immediately strike you as a horrible shift in policy. But I see several ways to…
