I took a sample CA bar exam for fun, as a non-lawyer who has never set foot in law school. Maybe the sample exam was tougher than the real thing, but I found it surprisingly difficult. A lot of the correct answers to questions were non-obvious -- they weren't based on straightforward logic, nor were they based on moral reasoning, and there was no place for "natural law" -- so to answer questions properly you had to have memorized a bit of coursework. There were also a few questions that seemed almost designed to deceive the test-taker; the "obvious" moral choices were the wrong ones.
So maybe it's easy if you study that stuff for a year or two. But you can't just walk in and expect to pass, or bullshit your way through it.
I agree with you on legal writing, but there appears to be a certain amount of ambiguity inherent to language. The Uniform Commercial Code, for instance, is maddeningly vague at points.
The CA bar exam used the be much harder than other states'. They lowered the pass threshold several years ago, and then reduced the length from 3 days to 2. Now it's probably much more in line with the national norms. Depending on when you took the sample exam, it might be much easier now.
Also, sometimes sample exams are made extra difficult, to convince students that they need to shell out thousands of dollars for prep courses. I recall getting 75% of questions wrong on some sections of a bar prep company's pre-test, which I later realized was designed to emphasize unintuitive/little-known exceptions to general rules. These corners of the law made up a disproportionate number of the questions on the pre-test and gave the impression that the student really needed to work on that subject.
I took a sample test as well and I believe I did well enough on some sections that I could have barely passed those sections with no background.
A key item which jumped out at me right away is that in addition to the logic, the possible answers would include things which the scenario didn't address. Like, a wrong answer might make an assumption that you couldn't arrive to via the scenario. More tricky were the answers which made assumptions which you knew to be correct (based on a real event,) but still wasn't addressed in the scenario. If you combined these two elements (getting the logic right, and eliminating assumptions which you couldn't make from the scenario) then you could do well on those.
The sections I wouldn't have passed were those which required specific law knowledge. So, some sections were general, while others required knowledge of something like real estate law. I don't remember if these questions were otherwise similar to the ones I could pass.
An LLM is taking this test as essentially an open book.
Obviously you need subject knowledge, that should be implicit?
Keep in mind even today[1] ( in California and few other states) you don't need to go law school to write the Bar exam and practice law, various forms of apprenticeship under a judge or lawyer are allowed
You also don't need to write the exam to practice many aspects of the legal profession.
The exam is never meant to be a high bar of quality or selection,it was always just a simple validation if you know your basics. Law like many other professions always operated on reputation and networks, not on degrees and certifications.
[1] Unlike say being a doctor, you have to go to med school without exception
> Obviously you need subject knowledge, that should be implicit?
Well, in a lot of the so-called soft sciences, you can easily beat a test without subject knowledge. I had figured that the bar exam might be something like that -- but it's more akin to something like biology, where there are a lot of arcane and counterintuitive little rules that have emerged over time. And you need to know those, or you're sunk. You can't guess your way past them, because the best-looking guesses tend to be the wrong ones.
(For what it's worth, I realize that this mostly has to do with the Common Law's reverence of precedent-as-binding, and that continental Civil Law systems don't suffer as much from it. But I suppose those continental systems have other problems of their own.)
Statutory law is no exception, it is not only common law which is inconsistent.
Laws are not logical constructs, they are political constructs, why expect logic from them.
Laws are passed or repealed because it is popular or politically advantageous to do so, not necessarily because it is moral or common sense.
On top of that politicians pass stupid legislation without understanding what they are doing all the time, the infamous Indiana pi bill is a simple example, it almost became law and was stopped by sheer luck, a mathematics professor attending that day on a unrelated matter.
Laws are conflicting, confusing, ambiguous and misleading most of the time, that is expected, the legislating them is a messy process. The third arm of any government judiciary sole purpose is to handle this mess.
---
P.S. I cannot say whether continental legal systems are more robust, but perhaps healthier democracy results in better laws.
All democracies are flawed, U.S. democracy is not particularly healthy, it is not say an proportional multi-party representative system with fair distribution of power amongst all citizens.
From the founding it has been a series of compromises, the history is littered with representation fights such as for suffrage, Jim crow and voting rights, slavery, electoral college, number of states or the filibuster or anti Chinese laws and so on and on.
Don't get me wrong last 250 years have been incredible progress and great leaders put their lives down to make it better, hopefully it will be even better in the future, the struggles do show in the laws it is able to pass, repeal or update.
So maybe it's easy if you study that stuff for a year or two. But you can't just walk in and expect to pass, or bullshit your way through it.
I agree with you on legal writing, but there appears to be a certain amount of ambiguity inherent to language. The Uniform Commercial Code, for instance, is maddeningly vague at points.