Should (When Will) Legal Research Skills Be Tested on the Bar Exam?

The idea that the bar exam should include a legal research skills component has been kicking around for quite awhile. The late Roy Mersky, Clair Germain (Cornell), Blair Kauffman (Yale), and others have been promoting the cause for years. The National Conference of Bar Examiners and many others have been skeptical that legal research can be testable in a bar exam format but most ALR instructors know that a carefully crafted set of questions can test for an understanding of both the principles of legal research and their application -- it's really nothing more that determining if the exam takers are thinking like law librarians by analyzing a research issue from the perspective of access points and routes to legal resources. 

One would think that the critique of legal education presented in the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's report Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (2007) and some recent studies like Katrina Fischer Kuh's (Hofstra) Electronically Manufactured Law study of researcher behavior and outcome [LLB post] would give the proposal some traction but that's debatable. Blair Kauffman reports on the latest developments and current prospects in Testing for Legal Research Skills on the Bar Exam: Are the Bar Examiners Ready? on AALL Spectrum blog. Required reading for everyone interested in improving the quality of legal research instruction in the legal academy. [JH]