TBA Law Blog


Posted by: Stacey Shrader Joslin on May 20, 2024

The American Bar Association’s (ABA) Council of the Section of Legal Education adopted a new policy statement that urges states to "create diverse pathways to licensure." That move deviates from more than a century of backing the use of bar exams for lawyer licensing, Reuters reports. The bar exam has come under fire in recent years for creating racial disparities in testing outcomes. The new policy statement also calls on states to create licensing structures that “mitigate the disparate exclusion from the profession of racial and ethnic minorities and individuals of low socioeconomic status.”