Character and Fitness Testing for Law School Applicants

I frequently get bar admission questions around this time of year. A common one is whether a student’s prior brush with the law will impact her application to the bar. 

Obviously, bar applicants have to report prior convictions and the like.  But I have always been troubled by the idea that law students could get through three years of law school, spend more than $100,000, and then suddenly discover that they can’t get admitted to the bar because of some prior legal trouble.

The reality, I think, is that this would happen in very few cases, because law schools typically ask about previous convictions.  If the past conviction is serious enough, presumably it would keep the student out of law school.  At the very least, the law school should put the student on notice that bar admission might be an issue.

Some states deal with this potential problem by forcing students to go through the character and fitness process while in law school.  But even in these states, students will already have sunk time and treasure into law school before discovering an admission problem.

To address these sorts of problems, I think it would be useful to have a process by which law school applicants could get pre-approved for admission to the bar for any conduct that occurred prior to the application. That is, the prospective law student could pay to go through a preliminary character and fitness process that would reveal whether any past legal trouble will give rise to any concerns from a bar admission perspective. I’m not familiar with character and fitness requirements, though, so perhaps such a procedure for law school applicants (and not simply for law students) already exists in some states. If not, is there any reason not to adopt such a procedure for prospective law school applicants who want to take advantage of it?

Comments

[Don Lundberg]

Indiana (and I think a number of other states) has a procedure whereby anyone accepted for admission into an accredited law school can go through a preliminary character and fitness review. See Indiana Admission and Discipline Rule 12, section 11. There is a modest $50 fee for taking advantage of this process.