New Mexico justices propose new pathway to the bar to ease rural legal desert
In an effort to ease its rural access-to-justice issues, two New Mexico Supreme Court justices on Tuesday presented a plan to the state legislature for a new alternative pathway to the bar.
The proposed program, the New Mexico Skills-Based Assessment, would aim to increase the number of lawyers that could serve people who live in the state’s legal deserts. According to the justices’ report, Rural Justice and Modernizing the Legal Profession in New Mexico, 22 of the state’s 33 counties have less than 1 lawyer per 1,000 residents, with 85% of lawyers clustered in the state’s larger cities. New Mexico is home to one law school.
The proposed program would complement the state’s existing Rural Justice Initiative, which added rural judicial clerkships and externships for law students and an incubator for licensed lawyers four years ago. The new program would mandate that candidates graduate from an ABA-accredited school, perform 675 hours of supervised practice within a year; produce a skills-based portfolio; and pass the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination and a character and fitness review, according to the report.
The graduates, who would be known as “authorized justice practitioners,” could start paid supervised practice while working at a host organization instead of taking the July bar exam and waiting several months for results. They could offer limited legal advice, draft documents and handle hearing preparation, among other tasks. At the midpoint of the program, candidates would submit a work product to bar examiners, the plan states.
“This plan eliminates some of the current barriers to licensure—including excessive costs—that prevent too many great future lawyers from joining the profession to serve communities that need them,” says Joan Howarth, professor emerita at University of Nevada Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law, who wrote the 2022 book Shaping the Bar: The Future of Attorney Licensing.
The report notes that more than half of the states in the country have established or are considering similar authorized justice practitioners.
New Mexico’s plan follows other states that have developed new pathways to the bar in recent years. Deborah Jones Merritt, professor emerita at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and co-principal investigator of the landmark 2020 report Building a Better Bar, sees similarities to plans in Oregon, Utah and Minnesota “as well as some distinctive New Mexico ideas. It’s wonderful to see states learning from one another and these approaches evolving.”
Chief Justice Julie Vargas and Justice Shannon Bacon presented the report to the state legislature’s interim Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee.
Justice Bacon also serves as the vice chair of Conference of Chief Justices and Conference of State Court Administrators, which issued directives on legal education and access to justice last summer and leads its accreditation working group, which will offer a draft report of findings and recommendations to the overall Committee on Legal Education and Admissions Reform by year’s end.
Bacon was very interested in broadening the competencies assessed on the bar exam, says Merritt, who assisted CLEAR. Bacon and others on the committee found the bar exam did a poor job assessing competencies, and they were interested in exploring alternative approaches, she adds.
In May, the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar voted to allow law schools to count those who successfully complete alternative pathways to count toward the mandatory 75% of graduates who must pass the bar within two years to meet accreditation standards, a move to support the changes many states are making.
Notably, Merritt says, the New Mexico report shows that only 45% of law professors and 23% of practitioners believe that new lawyers have sufficient skills to practice.
“That is appalling, given the high tuition that students pay to attend law school. The professors know they are falling short on that goal but have not adjusted their programs,” Merritt says. “This is rather dramatic evidence that state supreme courts and practitioners are right to press law schools to significantly modify their programs. The schools aren’t going to do that on their own.”
Howarth agrees. “Requiring law school plus rigorous supervised practice prior to obtaining a license protects the public from the serious deficiencies that new lawyers currently routinely inflict on the public,” she says. “This New Mexico licensing plan will improve public protection by ensuring that new lawyers have the range of knowledge and skills that their clients need them to have.”
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