American legal institutions must step up to better prepare law students to meet the shortage of legal services available in many communities, Justice Melissa Hart of the Colorado Supreme Court argued in the IJA 29th Annual Brennan Lecture on State Courts and Social Justice. Meeting those needs may require significant structural changes to the United States’s legal education system and administration of the bar exam, she said.
The January 28 event was hosted by NYU Law’s Institute of Judicial Administration and titled “Our Legal Institutions Must Change. But How?” The annual lecture, named for Justice William Brennan, highlights the contributions and work of the state judiciary.
In her remarks, Hart, who has served on the Colorado Supreme Court since 2017, said that while law school education prioritizes teaching students to think like lawyers, law school curriculums may not be structured to prepare students for the realities of running a law practice. She also contended that many bar exams do not adequately test the competence of bar candidates and can fail to protect consumers from the poor practice of law.
These issues inform a pressing question, Hart said: how can thinking about these systems of legal education and bar admissions address the crisis of providing adequate, affordable legal services to American communities?
While there’s no easy solution that will close the gap in access to legal services, the justice said, she highlighted ongoing efforts—including affordable law practice incubators—that offer lawyers a platform to figure out how to run practices that meet the needs of communities at more affordable rates for clients. “I offer the idea as a question about how we are doing legal education—whether that’s something that should be happening after law school, or whether that's something that should be happening during law school, and whether we can offer opportunities to students committed to serving communities in need through models we have not yet explored,” Hart said.
Selected remarks by Justice Melissa Hart from the Brennan Lecture:
“With only a few exceptions, state supreme courts in the US require, in addition to graduation from an accredited law school, completion of the bar exam to become a licensed attorney. We do this for, I believe, a fundamentally laudable reason: consumer protection. Attorneys have so much power, simply by virtue of our greater knowledge and understanding of legal rules and of the working of a complex system, that it is important to ensure that we meet some minimum standards of competence and professional ethics. But…is the assessment of minimum competence that most states use—the uniform bar exam—actually testing minimum competence?...And if not, what do we do about that?”
“The lawyer shortage is in public defenders and district attorney offices in more rural areas around the country, and it is among lawyers willing and able to charge rates that people can afford to help them with their basic legal needs: family, probate, estates, housing, consumer, public benefits, and criminal. I think it is not only fair, but very important, to start calling the work that these lawyers do…public interest work.”
Posted February 10, 2025