The bar exam can be a useful screening mechanism for testing a candidate's formal knowledge of any given state's laws and for measuring that candidate's ability to apply such knowledge to hypothetical situations (thus testing analytical and logical skills as well).
This obviously has an important bearing on whether someone is competent to practice law and that is why such exams are universally used as a minimal condition for entering the profession.
That said, the tests are in some respects arbitrary in that they fail to test for a wide variety of other traits that qualify one for practicing law, they fail miserably to screen many who do prove to be utterly incompetent practitioners, they bar others from practicing who in fact would be very able practitioners but who cannot pass the formal testing mechanism, and they limit the supply of legal services available to those who are least able to afford them, thus serving as an integral part of a guild system that may be seriously outdated in a modern world in which technology might be better able to be used to help people in legal matters if such barriers did not exist.
In other words, bar exams are all good in theory but in many ways serve to do more harm than good in limiting the potential for how legal services might ideally be provided now that the technical means are there for better standardizing them and for more efficiently delivering them. I don't believe this will change any time soon but who knows? Frustrations with the legal profession abound and maybe someday some of these guild-related elements will be re-examined. But I am not holding my breath.
This obviously has an important bearing on whether someone is competent to practice law and that is why such exams are universally used as a minimal condition for entering the profession.
That said, the tests are in some respects arbitrary in that they fail to test for a wide variety of other traits that qualify one for practicing law, they fail miserably to screen many who do prove to be utterly incompetent practitioners, they bar others from practicing who in fact would be very able practitioners but who cannot pass the formal testing mechanism, and they limit the supply of legal services available to those who are least able to afford them, thus serving as an integral part of a guild system that may be seriously outdated in a modern world in which technology might be better able to be used to help people in legal matters if such barriers did not exist.
In other words, bar exams are all good in theory but in many ways serve to do more harm than good in limiting the potential for how legal services might ideally be provided now that the technical means are there for better standardizing them and for more efficiently delivering them. I don't believe this will change any time soon but who knows? Frustrations with the legal profession abound and maybe someday some of these guild-related elements will be re-examined. But I am not holding my breath.