Will Bar Admission Standards Promote Adequate Legal Education in Practice Skills, Professionalism and Values for Tomorrow’s Lawyers? Lessons from New York

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: N/A

Room: Union Square 22

Floor: Fourth Floor

In 2015 (effective for 2019 J.D. and LL.M. graduates), New York became the first state to require bar applicants to demonstrate that they have acquired basic competence in essential lawyering skills and sufficient familiarity with key professional values. A Task Force composed of law professors, administrators, and Judge Rivera of the Court of Appeals recommended the adoption of a new Court Rule. Implementation of this requirement is underway, and already an advisory committee of bench and bar leaders has been convened to examine and confirm the adequacy of law school responses.
This session explores whether bar admission requirements like New York’s promote reforms in legal education that enable graduates to develop the professionalism, practice skills, and values that effective practitioners need, especially in the context of rapid change in the organization and delivery of legal services. Although experiential education is now commonplace in the majority of accredited law schools, and New York permits use of alternative models like its innovative Pro Bono Scholars program to satisfy residence and curricular prerequisites, are law schools in fact sufficiently focused on accomplishing the real learning outcomes necessary to meet this new standard?
The session will provide an overview of New York’s competency requirement, identifying its goals and potential benchmarks for assessing its impact. Panelists will address, and invite audience participation on, issues such as its premise that the starting point for identifying the skills and values which law school graduates seeking admission to the bar ought to demonstrate is the 1992 MacCrate Report. Can these long-sought objectives for legal education be achieved through a bar admission requirement? Should the MacCrate definitions of skills and values be modified or enhanced in light of current and future constraints on practice?