Examining the Bar Exam: An Empirical Analysis of Racial Bias in the Uniform Bar Examination

53 Pages Posted: 30 Jan 2022 Last revised: 8 Sep 2022

See all articles by Scott DeVito

Scott DeVito

Jacksonville University College of Law

Kelsey Hample

Furman University

Erin Lain

Drake University - Law School

Date Written: January 26, 2022

Abstract

The legal profession is one of the least diverse in the United States. Given continuing issues of racism in our society, the central position the justice system occupies in our society, and the vital role lawyers play in that system, it is incumbent upon those in the profession to identify and remedy the causes of this lack of diversity. This Article seeks to understand how the bar examination, the final hurdle to entry into the profession, contributes to this lack of diversity. Using publicly available data, we analyze whether the ethnic makeup of a law school’s entering class correlates to the school’s first-time bar pass rates on the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE). We find that the higher the proportion of Black and Hispanic students in a law school’s entering class, the lower the first-time bar passage rate for that school, in its UBE jurisdictions, three years later. This effect is not eliminated by controlling for other potentially causal factors including undergraduate point average, law school admission test score, geographic region, or law school tier. Moreover, the results are statistically robust at a p-value of 0.01 (a 1 in 100 chance that the results are due to random variation in the data). Because these results are at the school level, they may not fully account for relevant factors identifiable only in student-level data. As a result, we argue that a follow-up study using data relating to individual students is necessary to fully understand why the UBE produces racially and ethnically disparate results.

Keywords: bar exam, UBE, Uniform Bar Exam, diversity, bias, law students, legal profession, racism, law school, admission to the bar, quantitative, empirical, regression, statistically significant

Suggested Citation

DeVito, Scott and Hample, Kelsey and Lain, Erin, Examining the Bar Exam: An Empirical Analysis of Racial Bias in the Uniform Bar Examination (January 26, 2022). 55 University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 597 (2022), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4018386

Scott DeVito (Contact Author)

Jacksonville University College of Law ( email )

VyStar Tower, 18th Floor
76 South Laura St.
Jacksonville, FL Florida 32202
United States
904 256 8865 (Phone)
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HOME PAGE: http://https://www.ju.edu/law/

Kelsey Hample

Furman University ( email )

Greenville, SC
United States

Erin Lain

Drake University - Law School ( email )

27th & Carpenter Sts.
Des Moines, IA 50311
United States

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