Academic

If you don't know the story on Wisconsin's diploma privilege, check Christine's post from earlier this year. The news today is that the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled against a petition to extend the diploma privilege to every accredited law school in the U.S. The reason for the decision? If it ain't broke ...

The Court also declined to make all graduates of Wisconsin and Marquette take a bar examination. On this issue, Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson observed, "I am not convinced that the bar exam has a relationship to being a good practitioner. I am not sure that getting a law degree, and how well you do in law school, are necessarily related to practice." That last comment seems to have been directed at law schools generally; otherwise, it would undermine the decision on the diploma privilege. The next paragraph of the report reads, "Abrahamson was confident that Wisconsin law schools teach law students how to 'think, how to research and how to find the law' but questioned whether all law schools around the country do the same given different levels of quality and different grading systems."