California Supreme Court appoints Dean Jackie Gardina to committee on California Bar Exam

Gardina, who has helped propel The Colleges of Law’s mission to make legal education more accessible, will sit on the committee to consider changes to the state exam.

Jackie Gardina, dean and chief academic officer at The Colleges of Law, has been appointed to the Supreme Court of California’s Blue Ribbon Commission on the Future of the California Bar Exam. Gardina, who is currently the chair of the Committee of State Bar Accredited and Registered Schools, will serve on the commission’s California Attorney Practice Analysis Working Group.

The 19-person commission will recommend “whether to adopt alternative or additional testing or tools to ensure minimum competence to practice law.” This area of discussion has gained urgency during the COVID-19 pandemic. The California Bar Exam was administered online for the first time in October 2020, and the next online exam is scheduled for July 2021.

In addition to improving access to the California Bar Exam, Gardina views this committee and other recent steps by the California Supreme Court as necessary but not yet sufficient enough to promote greater equity and diversity in the profession. In a recent article for the Santa Barbara County Bar Association, she wrote, “The current bar exam does more than limit access to the profession, it drives law school curriculum and supports a profit-driven commercial bar exam preparation industry.” She goes on to say, “Yet, law schools spend an inordinate amount of time helping students gain the test-taking skills and knowledge necessary to pass an exam that bears little resemblance to the actual practice of law.”

During her time at The Colleges of Law, Gardina has been a visionary who is always striving to reimagine the teaching of law. She is a member of the California Attorney Practice Analysis Working Group, which conducted a job analysis study of the legal profession for the State Bar of California. In her first year as chair of the State Bar Committee for Accredited and Registered Law Schools, the committee drafted a new set of accreditation rules with a focus on best practices in accreditation and legal instruction.

Most significantly, through Gardina’s initiative, The Colleges of Law became the first accredited law school in California to offer a hybrid J.D. program with a distinct curriculum designed to prepare today’s law students for practice in the 21st century. Gardina conceived the hybrid degree in large part to bring down the cost of a J.D., which remains the largest obstacle to law school for many. With the creation of this Blue Ribbon Committee, Gardina believes that “California has an opportunity to reimagine how it licenses new attorneys.”

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