If California wants to lead, the bar should embrace reciprocity

A recent article by our esteemed former president of the State Bar of California, Jeffrey Bleich, criticized the excessive difficulty of passing the California State Bar. "We Must Set a Reasonable Standard for Passing the Bar." Daily Journal, August 7, 2019. Some may complain that we need better lawyers, but Mr. Bleich effectively describes the high costs of our low pass rate.

And here's an irony. Passing our nation's most difficult bar exam provides the least valuable license to practice. That's because California's isolationist indifference to bar licenses from other states leaves California's license worthless in other states. A lawyer getting a bar license in another state by passing an easier exam still is blessed with reciprocity in many other states, but not California. As State Bar president at the turn of the millennium, I argued that the time for reciprocity was then. We must enable California lawyers to practice in other states by allowing others to practice here. The easiest and most effective way to do that is to grant a California bar license to those licensed in other states who earn a specified minimum score on the multistate bar exam. If that score is somehow set too low and we feel we are overwhelmed with incompetent lawyers from other states, it would be simple to raise the score. Setting an appropriate passing score for the multistate bar exam sufficiently predicts acceptable attorneys licensed in other states.

If California wants to be a leader in the brave new world facing us where airplanes and digital technology allow and require the states to work together, it must build gates in the barriers we have erected for the occupational licensure of California lawyers. If we continue down the present isolationist path, we must not be surprised when the rest of the country, and indeed the world, considers California to be an obsolete irrelevancy in charting our legal course into the future.