I can tell you one thing about BAR/BRI’s deals, they are costing students lots more money than the local bars did… I am all for returning to competition. I took the Florida Bar review with BAR/BRI and was not impressed by any means. I actually stopped attending after the second week.

And that ends up equaling a lot of emails…

You would think this would prompt the average reader to ask: who cares? And yet this is one of the top emailed articles at the Times. What does that tell you?

But the issue, as you well know, is this: Would BarBri be better if it had competition, or would a superior competitior had emerged absent BarBri’s alleged anti-trust violations? I don’t know the answer, but there is at least some value in properly framing the dispute.

Today’s New York Times contains this engaging story about an antitrust suit against the leading bar review course provider, BAR/BRI. It’s worth a read.

UPDATE 1: Ethan Leib, at Prawfsblawg, makes an intriguing point about a possible ups…

This may very well be the situation (the way he sought out the case made me cringe a little), but the article seemed to include several specific details about the lawyer to lead to that conclusion, like how widely he grinned after he talked about his case. Details that I don’t remember often hearing about other pending legal cases. (Even in the NY Times…)

Here’s a brief listing of some of my arguments for abolishing the Bar Exam:

1. It doesn’t test on the kinds of skills a good lawyer should have.

2. It often tests on obsolete legal rules.

3. The Bar Exam is largely a memory test, and memorizing legal rules is not something that most lawyers really need to do.

4. The Bar Exam often serves to inhibit practicing lawyers from moving readily from state to state. The investment in time to retake the Bar Exam can be too much for many if they are going to a state without reciprocity.

5. The Bar often weeds out people who don’t have the money to take an expensive course like BarBri. Certainly, there are the unlucky folks who take BarBri and fail, but this does not frequently occur.

6. There is no need for lawyers to know much about a lot of Bar Exam subjects. Does a criminal lawyer need to know the rule against perpetuities?

7. The Bar consumes hours upon hours of time. This time could be used much more productively in ways that help out the community. Right now, time studying for the Bar is time that could be spent helping others or doing something more productive. The time taken to study for the Bar is wasted time, with little value to the person studying or to society.

8. Nobody really uses the rules as formulated on the Bar Exam. As I’ve written elsewhere, if one practiced the criminal law on the Bar Exam, one would be disbarred!

9. As far as barriers to entry, the Bar Exam is not really necessary. Law school is a significant barrier to entry. It requires three long years of time, study, and money. In the end, it’s much easier to make it past one Bar Exam than through three years of law school.

Stan Chess’s Lawschool.com has extensive coverage of the BarBri case.

Kaplan is owned by the Washington Post; BAR/BRI is owned by Thomson — Canadian, incidentally. I’m fairly confident that the Washington Post and Thomson could announce a merger agreement tomorrow and not a single antitrust regulator would bat an eyelash, rendering the Kaplan-BAR/BRI “anticompetitive” agreement moot. The parents could merge but the subsidiaries couldn’t fashion a mutual non-compete agreement? That makes no sense.