Pro Bono as a Requirement for Bar Admission?
By: Steve Grumm
As has been well documented, New York State is rolling out a requirement that candidates for admission to the bar complete 50 hours of pro bono work. (On a related note, supporters of increased law school pro bono tried, without success, to persuade the ABA to build a pro bono requirement into the law school accreditation standards. Here’s some background on that effort, and here’s the coverage of the ABA’s reaction.) Now, UC Irvine Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky is making the case for states to join New York in requiring pro bono for bar admission. Chemerinsky writes in the National Law Journal:
New York’s new requirement for pro bono work as a condition for admission to the bar should be a model for other states to copy. Last May, Jonathan Lippman, chief judge of New York, announced this proposal. On September 12, the New York Court of Appeals adopted a requirement that, effective January 1, 2015, admission to the New York bar will require an applicant having completed 50 hours of pro bono service. This is to be applauded: Pro bono work helps to meet the enormous unmet demand for legal services, provides law students valuable legal training and hopefully instills a lifelong habit of public service.
At a recent meeting, an American Bar Association committee considering possible changes to accreditation standards seemed unreceptive to the idea of requiring all law schools to insist on 50 hours of pro bono work from their students. But that won’t matter if states follow New York’s lead and require pro bono work as a condition for admission to the bar.
Read the full piece for Dean Chemerinsky’s exploration of the pros and cons. We’d love to hear what our readers, particularly law students, think about the ideas of building pro bono requirements into either, of both, law school curricula or bar admission standards.