Since when have conservatives started defending the bar examination? For decades, many on the right have argued it was an arbitrary barrier to entry into the legal profession. Now, some conservatives are arguing that reforms designed to make it a highly practical exam are actually promoting DEI and wokeness.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
As a current Arizona Supreme Court justice and a retired Minnesota Supreme Court justice, we both served on the judicial advisory committee convened to inform the development of the new exam, many of whose recommendations were included in the final product.
We fully endorse the NextGen exam as a rigorous, client-focused assessment of legal doctrine and lawyering skills that additionally serves to facilitate license portability across the U.S. — a longstanding conservative priority.
Both of our states have adopted the new bar exam, which will be first given in July 2026, and in our jurisdictions in July 2027. Both courts engaged in thorough review processes that included evaluation of doctrine and skills content in the exam, results from pilot and prototype testing, and other relevant information.
Like all state high courts, our courts are responsible for admitting new lawyers in Arizona and Minnesota. That responsibility includes a duty to ensure, to the extent possible, that only those who meet our states’ standards of competence are licensed to practice law.
We—and our colleagues across the country — took our responsibility seriously in evaluating the NextGen bar exam. Forty-one states and territories have now adopted it, bringing the testing of prospective lawyers into the 21st Century.
The construction of the exam began with a novel idea that also happens to be a best practice in licensure exams — the National Conference of Bar Examiners, the ultimate author of the exam, decided to ask more than 14,800 U.S. lawyers what topics should be tested on a bar exam. Those lawyers came from every part of the US and every imaginable practice and employment, from rural areas to big cities, and those opinions helped shape the new exam.
Nor has this project been hidden from the public. Since the inception of the NextGen project in 2018, extensive information was regularly published about the development and performance of the new exam. Even a cursory review of the NextGen website and related publications makes it evident that the process is steeped in scientific rigor, data analytics, and oversight by subject matter experts — lawyers, judges, and law faculty.
Like the current Uniform Bar Exam, the NextGen bar exam will serve as an important bridge among the states and territories that administer it, facilitating score portability across the U.S. A NextGen bar exam score earned anywhere in the country can be transferred for admission purposes to any other state or territory that elects to accept it.
As of today, only one of the 43 adopting Courts has indicated that it will not accept qualifying scores earned in other NextGen jurisdictions.
Over 70,000 attorneys have taken advantage of the score portability program offered through the current exam, and portability continues to be a compelling argument for a nationally administered and accepted bar exam.
At no point has the National Conference of Bar Examiners asserted that its purpose in developing the NextGen exam was to make it easier than the current bar exam, as some have recently and falsely claimed, nor has conference made that argument to our courts. As with the current bar exam, it is the highest court in each of the 43 states that determines what a passing score is, not the National Conference of Bar Examiners.
The NextGen bar exam will more closely reflect day-to-day law practice by requiring application of legal knowledge to client-oriented tasks, along with demonstrating mastery of foundational legal subjects such as constitutional and criminal law, torts, property, and contracts. The new exam also requires successful examinees to understand and apply the principles of professional responsibility — essential to legal ethics — to ensure lawyers are prepared to navigate the complexities of the attorney-client relationship.
By the time the NextGen exam launches, over 10,500 third-year law students and new lawyers will have tested the content through pilot, field, prototype, and beta administrations. All NextGen bar exam questions generate performance statistics that are analyzed by psychometricians, attorney test editors, and subject matter experts to assure appropriate difficulty, clarity, and suitability for a high-stakes licensure exam.
From our perspective, the new bar exam will measure not simply book learning, but the demonstrated ability to practice law. Members of the legal profession from across the political spectrum should support this change.
Justice Clint Bolick is a sitting member of the Arizona Supreme Court and retired Justice G. Barry Anderson is a former member of the Minnesota Supreme Court.
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