At hearing on diversity, lawyers push for lowering the bar exam score

SACRAMENTO -- During a hearing on how to increase diversity in the legal profession in California, one idea came up over and over: lowering the score needed to pass the bar exam.

California's cut score of 1440 is the second highest in the country, after Delaware. This has a real world impact on who becomes a lawyer, Monterey College of Law Dean Mitch Winick told the Assembly Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

Winick said according to his calculations, if California's cut score matched the national average of 1350, more than 8,000 "qualified minority candidates" who have done "everything but" pass the bar exam would be lawyers in the state today. He suggested the current cut score could invite a constitutional challenge.

The state Constitution "says we should not have pre-employment testing or licensing that has a disparate impact based on race, gender or age," Winick said.

The state Supreme Court has repeatedly declined to change the score requirement in recent years. But multiple witnesses rejected a common argument against lowering the cut score: that it allows less skilled law students to become attorneys.

Several alleged implicit bias within the test and said many immigrant and minority law students face greater challenges to make it to the bar exam.

Karen Pedraza, a student at UC Davis School of Law, testified about falling behind in school when she was young while moving around as the child of migrant farm workers. She said she took the LSAT while working full time.

"There needs to be change in how we evaluate students to get into law school," she said.

Orange County Superior Court Judge Elizabeth G. Macias said she was given little encouragement by teachers, from the time she "flunked second grade" through law school when she saw few professors who looked like her. This discouragement continued even after she'd been an attorney for years.

"When I approached people about becoming an Orange County Superior Court judge, I was told, 'People like you don't get appointed,'" Macias said.

As several panelists noted, California's bar and the judiciary have become more diverse in recent years. During his final eight years in office, Gov. Jerry Brown named women to fill almost half of the judicial vacancies; about 40% were non-white.

The prominence of racial minorities in California could also be seen among the 14 panelists who spoke. This group included Kevin C. Brazile, the first African-American presiding judge in the history of the Los Angeles County Superior Court and state Supreme Court Justice Goodwin H. Liu.

Liu described his path to the high court as depending in part on luck -- specifically that "the very first lawyer I met" was late Rep. Robert Matsui, who was also Asian-American. Matsui sponsored him to become a page in the U.S. Congress when he was still in high school.

"From his mentorship and example, I came to realize that a person like me could grow up to be a person like him," Liu said.

He added, in reference to Matsui's time at the Tule Lake Japanese internment camp as a child during World War II: "I also think about what a more inclusive legal profession might have had on Bob's life."

Liu said that despite "progress," Asians, African-Americans and Latinos are all underrepresented on the bench compared to their numbers in the state population. He said these numbers reflect the "obstacle course" minorities face in getting the jobs most likely to lead to judicial appointments, notable in district attorney's offices. A 2014 Stanford University study found 73% of superiors in prosecutor's offices in California were white. The white population in the state is under 40%, the Stanford study said