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This is a disaster in the making. The trend throughout the 20th century has been to require entrants to a profession to undertake structured training, rather than merely cram for an exam, in circumstances where the examiner is under pressure not to fail someone.

Much is made of the New York bar exam, but that is exceptional as 48 states do not allow candidates to be admitted without formal training in US law and no state, and that includes New York, allows candidates to be admitted without formal training in some legal system.

Moreover, mainstream legal practice in New York requires formal legal training in an ABA approved law school. That is not a law or a professional rule but the almost invariable practice of law firms in New York. Almost everyone who is admitted to the NY bar without this, is in truth confined to the penumbra of legal practice, if they obtain employment in the law at all.

The SRA proposal is that anyone with a degree in pointless studies who can get a job as a paralegal (or more probably as an apprentice earning £3.50 an hour and possibly with a hefty backhander from Daddy) and can pay a crammer to get them through a multiple choice examination will qualify. I can assure you Slaughter & May will not be hiring them anytime soon. What you are creating is a ghetto for members of ethnic communities where there is a high social cachet attached to being a lawyer regardless of actual likely income.

Real legal jobs will go to graduates of universities with strong academic records but with far worse diversity records, both ethnic and social composition, than the legal profession.

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