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The Secret Benefit of Federal Lawyering By Jeremy S. Weber
Jeremy S. Weber is a member of the editorial board of The Federal Lawyer. He currently serves as the deputy district counsel for Military and Veterans Affairs Programs at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Sacramento District. He is a retired Air Force judge advocate who served as an appellate judge and law professor at Air University. Weber has numerous law review articles to his name in military and civilian journals. He is a member of the Ohio and Alabama state bars, and hopefully the California bar by the time of this publication. The views expressed are solely those of the author.
Recently, I did something out of character. I broke a promise to myself. In July 1996, I walked out of a convention center in Columbus, Ohio, in a daze. After preparing for and then enduring the two-and-a-half-day bar examination, I swore to myself that I would never take another bar exam. If I hadn’t done enough to pass, I said to myself, I would simply go back to journalism. I did not have it in me to put myself through the stress, exhaustion, expense, and uncertainty of another bar exam. Fortunately, I handily passed, and I went on to practice law for the next 20+ years as an active duty Air Force attorney. During that time, I was stationed in nine states, the District of Columbia, and a foreign country. I brought my Ohio law license with me for each position, always able to practice law without seeking admission to the state in which I was located.1 When I retired, I worked for the Alabama attorney general after having been admitted there through reciprocity, without having to sit for the bar exam.2 My promise to never take another bar exam seemed safe, as long as I remained safely within the borders of Alabama or any other state that permitted admission upon motion. In 2020, my wife and I realized we needed to move to California to take care of an elderly relative. I was fortunate to find a federal job in California, so I did not need to immediately be admitted to the California bar, but I harbor long-term career goals that require me to be licensed in the state. California does not offer admission on motion or otherwise offer exemptions from the bar exam requirement.3 So, with great reluctance, I broke my promise to myself and registered for the February 2022 California bar exam. The experience was … well, it’s over. It certainly wasn’t any easier taking the bar as a 51-year-old attorney than as a 25-year-old recent graduate, despite having practical experience in many of the exam’s subject areas. Studying at night and on weekends while working full time was every bit as exhausting as I remembered from the previous exam. It took every bit of discipline I acquired over the years to stick to my schedule. In the end, I did what I needed to do and gave myself every opportunity to do well on the bar exam. However, it wasn’t without great personal costs in terms of time, money, and health.
6 • THE FEDERAL LAWYER • May/June 2022
The experience gave me a renewed appreciation for the portability that federal attorneys enjoy. Because the majority of federal attorneys do not appear in state court, most positions simply require admission to the bar of any state or federal court. As a result, federal attorneys enjoy a degree of flexibility that most attorneys can only envy. Many federal attorneys can move from position to position and location to location without ever needing to worry about state-to-state bar requirements. This is an enormous benefit, particularly as the last two-plus years have revealed the importance of locational flexibility in many peoples’ lives. Many people would like to relocate, but few would do so at the cost of taking another bar exam. I am not alone in realizing the simple fact that bar exams are no fun. The usefulness and cost of state bar exams has been the subject of extensive scholarship recently.4 As one law professor noted, “to write merely that the bar exam is the subject of criticism would be a colossal understatement.”5 Opinion in the legal community has shifted noticeably in favor of some form of license portability or admission without taking multiple bar exams. One poll showed that 58.3 percent of attorneys polled favored them being able to easily attain admission on motion to other states, while an additional 40.8 percent favored multistate or national licensing.6 Only 0.9 percent of respondents favored state-by-state licensing without reciprocity.7 This sentiment has been reflected in the policies of 42 states that permit some sort of admission for attorneys licensed in another state without sitting for another bar exam, though many of these states require the other state to permit admission on motion under equal terms.8 Even my new home state of California, which requires passing the state bar exam in all but a very narrow set of situations,9 has begun to consider changes to the exam, though admission on motion does not seem to be on the table for now.10 In recognition of the need for portability, 40 states have adopted the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE), an exam coordinated by the National Conference of Bar Examiners that is intended to allow one’s score to be transferred to other UBE jurisdictions.11 However, even the UBE has not provided full mobility for attorneys due to factors such as holdout states, different state scoring requirements, and the fact that states
