Well, This Is An Awful Way To Get Your Legal Career Off The Ground

Do you have a lifelong ambition to be a lawyer, but don’t have the LSAT score to actually get into law school? May I suggest a four-year stint in the North Dakota legislature as a paid(!) way to the career of your dreams? That’s right, according to a proposed new law, North Dakota House Bill 1609, introduced by state Rep. Lori Van Winkle (R-Minot), folks would be able to sit for the bar exam with nothing more than four years as a legislator under their belt!

This is, objectively, an awful idea. The bar exam covers a shit ton more than just statutory interpretation, and exactly nothing about serving in the legislature for a mere four years gives you the ability to distinguish between whether evidence is nonhearsay or an exception to the hearsay rule. There’s a lot of, well, law, that you learn in law school and someone trying to become an attorney through this laughably inadequate path is likely to find themselves frustrated at the prospect. Not to mention the potential problems this could cause for the public when they depend on lawyers as experts to guide them through the often confusing maze of legal requirements. As Rob Port, a reporter who’s covered the North Dakota legislature for two decades, writes:

Would you feel adequately represented in a legal proceeding in which your liberty and property is at risk by someone whose legal qualification is a term in Bismarck voting on book bans and blue laws?

Would we let someone qualify as a surgeon because they spent some time working in a butcher shop?

C’mon. Let’s be serious.

The current legal licensing scheme is far from perfect. But if the ongoing quest of Kim Kardashian to get that Esq. after her name via a less that traditional path teaches us anything, it’s that for good or for bad, the law school to bar exam route is a lot more consistent way to start a legal career.