The Oregon Supreme Court is considering approving a similar, third licensure path — in addition to the traditional bar exam and SPPE — that would allow students to take coursework and complete supervised practice requirements during school so that they are licensed when they graduate.
Even the national bar exam is changing: The National Conference of Bar Examiners will begin rolling out a NextGen test in select states in 2026, with a focus on more foundational lawyering skills such as client counseling and advising, dispute resolution, and client relationship and management.
Law schools for several decades have been incorporating more real-world skills into their curriculum, said Deborah Jones Merritt, professor emerita at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, who has studied the bar exam’s deficiencies in producing good lawyers. Merritt’s research has determined that the exam is far more challenging to pass for people of color, those with caretaking responsibilities, or those who come from low-income households.
Beginnings of change
Many states began rethinking the necessity of the bar exam in 2020 during the pandemic, when gathering hundreds of people together in a big room for an exam was a potential superspreader event for COVID-19.
In place of the test, several states and the District of Columbia issued what’s known as diploma privilege, the ability to practice without passing the bar. Utah, for example, required their graduates to fulfill a pro bono requirement first. It was an eye-opening experiment, said Bramble, in part because “nothing crazy happened.”
Then in 2021, the American Bar Association for the first time released statistics breaking down bar exam passage rates by race. White test takers were far likelier to pass the exams in 2020 than those of other races or ethnicities, according to the group. Although there are other barriers to a legal career, including law school entrance exams and the time, expense and quality of the schooling, the numbers made it clear that the bar exam itself had flaws that kept many candidates of color from becoming lawyers.
One of the biggest flaws of the bar is that it’s an expensive and time-consuming exam, said Brian Gallini, the former dean of the Willamette University College of Law in Oregon and one of the architects of the licensure push in the state. Law school graduates often pay for a law review class, which often can cost more than $1,000, to study for the test in the months following their graduation, as well as put off earning a living in their degree field until they’re licensed and can begin working as lawyers.
Those who work a job while they study are more likely to fail, but many students cannot afford not to work — they carry an average of $160,000 in student loan debt when they exit school.
Gallini, now the dean of the Quinnipiac University School of Law in Connecticut, fielded a lot of angry emails when he first introduced the idea to the Willamette law school’s alumni in 2022. Many objections were reflexive: Critics of the proposal said they had suffered through the bar exam, so aspiring lawyers who followed them should face a similar rite of passage.
Oregon’s licensure is not portable for now, which means that graduates who choose the SPPE are not able to transfer their licenses to other states. This will likely change as more states adopt alternative licensure.
So far, only a handful of 2024 graduates from the state’s three law schools have chosen the new pathway; McQueeny-Rose said many of her peers haven’t been able to find supervising attorneys who are familiar enough with the program to oversee their work.
That’s also expected to change quickly. The state’s law schools are beginning to establish prestigious post-graduate fellowships aimed at placing SPPE participants in communities of need, including immigration law, public defense and rural law practices. Judicial clerkships also are eligible to fulfill many of the program’s requirements.
McQueeny-Rose will be joining the team at Levi Merrithew Horst, a Portland, Oregon, firm, where she’ll work on police misconduct cases, class-action suits on behalf of incarcerated people and other civil rights work. Instead of studying for the bar, she’s taking the summer off to devote time to her artwork and to move to Portland for her new job. She anticipates she’ll fulfill the requirements of the SPPE program in early 2025.
“For me, it was a pretty easy decision,” McQueeny-Rose said. “I knew I wanted to stay in Oregon. I’m committed to practice here, I love it here. I have a lot of ideas how to make Oregon better, and I want to stay and do my part.”
Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy
