Joe Forward, “States consider Uniform Bar Exam to boost cross-border employment opportunities”
Brief thoughts:
(1) A Uniform Bar Exam (UBE), reduces legal labor market entry costs, which is good for everyone (except people who write state bar exams, but they’re the inefficiency in the system so I don’t care).
(2) These paragraphs caught my eye:
At Marquette University Law School, assistant dean for career planning Paul Katzman said a UBE would greatly facilitate flexibility in searching for a job, but cautioned that such facilitation could increase competition for jobs in destinations popular for lawyers. [My emphasis]
As a Marquette grad, I know Dean Katzman. Nice guy. His comment tells us that we should expect some states to be destination states and some to be exodus states when it comes to national law student distribution, and I’m still working on that dataset.
“The majority of our graduates prefer to remain in Wisconsin and for those that are motivated to go outside the state … the investment in terms of money and time devoted to exam preparation is a deterrent unless a position has already been secured out-of-state,” said Katzman, who from a career planning perspective, welcomes a UBE. [My emphasis]
Speaking of the dataset, it’ll be interesting to compare Wisconsin’s law student ratio to state population to others’ if one of its two law schools tends to serve instate needs. I can’t speak for Madison’s graduates, but Wisconsin appears to be a neutral state rather than a destination or exodus one. I should have the data published by next week.
The Last Gen X American 