Legal News

Calif. bar fights to block access to bar exam data

By Jason Siegel

Bar exam data, such as race and test scores, that are being requested by a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) should not be released to the public, according to the State Bar of California in court papers filed on Monday before the California Supreme Court.

The papers are in response to a recent petition filed by Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law, who, along with former State Bar governor Joe Hicks and the California First Amendment Coalition, want the State Bar to hand over data, but not the names, of bar applicants. For the past two years, Sander has been on a quest to obtain the data in an effort to bolster a controversial study he authored claiming that affirmative action might be the cause of high bar failure rates among black students who were academically unprepared for some of the nation's top law schools.

The State Bar's Committee of Bar Examiners has refused his request, arguing that the data should not be released to the public because applicants believed the information would remain confidential and only be used in connection with the bar exam.

Similar arguments appear in Monday's court papers filed by the State Bar, which is being represented by Michael von Loewenfeldt, a partner at Kerr & Wagstaffe in San Francisco. The State Bar added that the data, which include race, law school attended and bar exam scores from 1972 to 1997, would require extensive staff and resources to compile since the information doesn't already exist in the requested format. Further, the data do not constitute court documents that are open to the public.

State and federal law "clearly recognizes a distinction between official records of court proceedings, which are subject to public inspection, and other types of documents or information that happen to be within the possession of the judicial branch, which are not," the State Bar said in court papers.

James Chadwick, a partner in the Menlo Park, Calif., office of Los Angeles-based Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton, who represents Sander, did not return a call for comment.

-- Amanda Bronstad

Previous posting:

"UCLA professor seeks bar exam data from state Supreme Court," Aug. 8, 2008

Full post as published by Legal Pad | LA on August 19, 2008 (boomark / email).