The American legal profession is in crisis, and the NextGen Bar Exam is the latest symptom of a disease that’s rapidly metastasizing: the abandonment of merit in favor of ideological box-checking.
For decades, the bar exam was the last line of defense — a rigorous filter ensuring that only those with real legal chops could represent the public. Today, that filter is being shredded, sacrificed on the altar of equity and inclusion. The result? A collapse in standards, the death of meritocracy, and a profession on the brink of irrelevance.
The NextGen Bar Exam, set to roll out in 2026, is not about modernizing legal education or making better lawyers. It is about making the exam easier to pass. Out go the demanding essays and complex legal analysis; in come more multiple-choice questions and “practical” scenarios that test little more than common sense and the ability to regurgitate buzzwords. The new mantra is “minimal competence,” a phrase so hollow as to be meaningless.
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Vilda Westh Blanc is a Collegiate Associate at the Manhattan Institute. Tim Rosenberger is a legal fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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