Chuck Bryant

But by 1750, which is pretty early on, all of the colonies got on board basically and said, all right, we need standards for people to do this job.

And we need to kind of all agree on what that's going to be.

Yeah.

And like a lot of stuff or most things with American law, they were following in the tradition of England, which had had some sort of exam or another for people to become attorneys as far back as the 16th century.

But America wasn't that far behind, you know, a couple hundred years ago.

Apparently, the first one was Delaware in 1783.

And it was essentially just you would go and hang out with a judge and they would quiz you on some legal stuff.

And if you got it right, you were accepted to the bar.

You were an attorney from that point on.

It was okay for you to practice.

It was also supposedly looked on as very easy, too.

Yeah.

Yeah, I imagine a lot of that depended on the judge that you got and maybe how much they liked you in those early days.

It was really sort of the wild, wild west.

Libya helped us with this, and she dug up a pretty fun story about Abraham Lincoln.

who was a bar examiner for the state of Illinois in the 1850s and was apparently just like at a hotel chatting with a lawyer in a room.

And the lawyer answered a few questions and Lincoln was like, congratulations, you're an attorney.

So great, man.

Yeah.

Yeah, I love that story, too.