Bar Exams

These are historically horrible results -- the worst in nearly 70 years.

* “You were very busy. Wow. Wow. I always knew I liked him.” President Trump posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom to the Justice Antonin Scalia on Friday and managed to crack a joke about the late justice’s sex life when referring to his wife and their nine children. Wow. [USA Today]

* Speaking about birth control… President Trump has proposed a new way for employers to get around the Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate by creating a Title X loophole that would “hijack” programs that already have limited funding and send women to low-income family planning clinics to get their contraceptives. [New York Times]

* Will Biglaw be the next thing that millennials kill? Not only has Weil Gotshal shortened its partner track in order to keep its youthful talent from walking out the door, but the firm that once made a big joke out of work/life balance is now allowing associates to work from home once a week. [American Lawyer]

* The California bar exam results are out, and they’re not anything to write home about — except if you enjoy schadenfreude, that is. Nearly six in 10 failed the test, and the overall pass rate is historically horrible. More on this later. [The Recorder]

* After having already been rejected by the ABA’s House of Delegates, the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has sent its proposed 75 percent bar-passage rate within two years of graduation accreditation standard right back for another vote. Will it be approved this time around? We shall see. [ABA Journal]

* Joel Sanders, the ex-CFO of failed firm Dewey & LeBoeuf, was jailed on Thursday for failing to pay a $1 million fine associated with his fraud conviction, but he was out by the wee hours of the morning on Friday thanks to his new firm, Greenspoon Marder, which paid the entire sum on his behalf. [American Lawyer]

Some D.C. bar examinees have been put through the ringer and they didn't have to be.

Which law schools’ pass rates climbed, and which law schools sank like stones?

Make sure that you don’t get hung up on tasks that don’t serve your bar exam goals and to keep your eye on the prize.

* Justice Brett Kavanaugh isn’t the only one who’s relying upon calendars as a defense to sexual misconduct allegations. President Donald Trump says he’ll turn over portions of his calendars and journal entries to combat allegations that he forcibly kissed Summer Zervos, a former Apprentice contestant. [USA Today]

* Do you support term limits or a mandatory retirement age for Supreme Court justices? If yes, then a majority of Americans agree with you. Fix the Court polled 1,000 people, and 78 percent of them said they’d like to restrict the length of service for SCOTUS justices. [The Hill]

* Per a new survey conducted by Diversity Lab and ChIPs called the Inclusion Blueprint, the Biglaw firms with the best policies to build gender equity are Brooks Kushman and Sheppard Mullin. We may have more on this later. [Big Law Business]

* Shocking absolutely no one, now that Cooley Law is magically in “compliance” with the American Bar Association’s accreditation standards, the school has dropped its lawsuit against the ABA. This is terribly convenient, isn’t it? [ABA Journal]

* Ieshia Champs, the 33-year-old single mother of five children whose inspirational graduation photos went viral this past spring, recently found out that she passed the Texas bar exam. Congratulations! All of your hard work paid off! [Fox 10 KSAZ]

* Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) says he plans to introduce legislation to end our “absurd policy of birthright citizenship.” Good luck with that, Senator, because if you want to amend the Constitution, you’ll need a two-thirds majority in Congress and ratification of three-quarters of the states. [The Hill]

* Women are allegedly being paid to make false sexual assault and harassment claims against Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and now the FBI is investigating the situation. The going rate for these made-up stories is apparently $20,000. [The Atlantic]

* After having its plan to gift a troubled law school to Middle Tennessee State University be flat-out rejected, Valparaiso Law has decided to call it quits. We’ll have more on this totally unpredictable development later today. [ABA Journal]

* If you’re in law school and your girlfriend breaks up with you, you should probably stop calling her — unless, of course, you don’t mind a harassment conviction and spending a year in jail. Now this fellow is trying to overcome his character and fitness obstacles to become a member of the bar. [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]

* In case you missed it, the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School just unleashed about 6.5 million digitized court decisions online, for free, as part of the Caselaw Access Project. No, that’s not a typo — everything is free. [Fortune]

* How did graduates of the Charleston School of Law do on the South Carolina bar exam this past summer? Not too well. For the second year in a row, more than half of them failed the test. On the “bright side,” 59 percent of first-time takers from the school passed, up 11 percentage points from last year. [Post and Courier]

Less than half of this school's graduates passed the exam this summer.

Use the cardinal rule to think about how you would like to be treated in the same situation.

Congratulations!

That's a lot of persistence.

Maybe there should be a cap on the number of times you can take the bar exam.

They'd like you to believe this about the school's students and graduates -- not the money its investors will lose if the school can no longer operate.

The academic support department at your school will help you evaluate your options and choose the things that will best set you up for success.

Nicely done.

Which schools performed the best on the test, and which performed the worst?