North Carolina Becomes 30th UBE Jurisdiction
This news seemed to have flown under the radar. On November 17 (the Friday before Thanksgiving), the North Carolina Board of Law Examiners updated its website with the following announcement:
Please be advised that the Rules Governing the Admission to Practice Law in the State of North Carolina will change as of June 30, 2018. These new Rules provide for the adoption of the Uniform Bar Examination in North Carolina, and apply to all applications for admission filed in North Carolina on or after June 30, 2018.
The first UBE administration in the Tar Heel state will be February 2019. The UBE is coordinated by the National Conference of Bar Examiners and is composed of the Multistate Essay Examination (MEE), two Multistate Performance Test (MPT) tasks, and the Multistate Bar Examination (MBE). It is uniformly administered, graded, and scored by user jurisdictions and results in a portable score that can be transferred to other UBE jurisdictions.
The announcement of the adoption of the UBE isn't surprising. The question wasn't "if," but rather "when." After all, In October 2016, the North Carolina Board of Law Examiners recommended that North Carolina begin administering the Uniform Bar Examination. But that recommendation needed the approval of the State Bar Council and the Supreme Court of North Carolina to effect. Now, it looks like the necessary approval took place.
North Carolina, according to the NCBE's website, is now the 30th jurisdiction to have adopted the UBE (38 states, the District of Columbus, and the U.S. Virgin Islands).
The list of UBE jurisdictions are:
February 2011
Missouri
North Dakota
July 2011
Alabama
February 2012
Colorado
Idaho
July 2012
Arizona
February 2013
Nebraska
Utah
July 2013
Montana
Washington
Wyoming
February 2014
Minnesota
New Hampshire
July 2014
Alaska
February 2016
Iowa
Kansas
New Mexico
July 2016
District of Columbia
New York
Vermont
February 2017
Connecticut
New Jersey
South Carolina
July 2017
Maine
Oregon
Virgin Islands
West Virginia
July 2018
Massachusetts
February 2019
North Carolina
To Be Announced
Maryland
So, who's next?
