2025 ABA Legal Rebels: Joan Howarth (UNLV) And Deborah Jones Merritt (Ohio State)

ABA Journal, 2025 Legal Rebels: Rebels Without a Pause:

For the 2025 class of Legal Rebels, the ABA Journal and the ABA Center for Innovation have chosen to honor seven individuals and one state licensing board. This year’s inductees include several reformers looking at alternatives to the bar exam and attorney licensing process; legal technologists looking to serve some of the most vulnerable people in the country; a pioneer in the field of legal research; and even a judge who is, perhaps, most famous for being in a viral video in which a lawyer assures him that he is not a cat.

ABA Journal, Examining the Future: Joan Howarth and Deborah Jones Merritt Are Spearheading Efforts to Reinvent Attorney Licensing:

For the last three decades, complaints about the bar exam were common but change was minimal. But Joan Howarth and Deborah Jones Merritt wanted to do more than grumble.

While most lawyers take the bar exam and then never want to think about it again, Merritt, 69, and Howarth, 74, have never forgotten. They have been diligently committed to keeping the conversation going about changes to the traditional exam, which launched 53 years ago.

Each marched forward, conducting research over 25 years that investigated why licensing processes need to change and what remedies would halt the inequities stemming from the current exam process.

Now, with the Uniform Bar Exam due to sunset in 2028, these two retired academics are the go-to advisers for jurisdictions evaluating wide-ranging options for licensure as they bring the duo’s ideas on reform closer to reality.

“They are two incredible thought leaders in the licensure space,” says Brian Gallini, dean of Quinnipiac University School of Law, who worked with both women on the Oregon State Bar’s reform efforts. “We should have been listening to them much earlier.”

Merritt, professor emerita at Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, was co-principal investigator of the landmark 2020 report Building a Better Bar. She left teaching a year later to devote her retirement years to bar reform and has been hands-on in reform efforts around the country, including those in Oregon, Nevada and California. In addition, she has spoken to groups in New York, Ohio, Indiana, Utah, Minnesota, Michigan, Texas and Massachusetts about bar reform.

Howarth, who was dean at Michigan State University College of Law from 2008-2016 and, as of July 1, professor emerita at University of Nevada Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law, wrote the 2022 book Shaping the Bar: The Future of Attorney Licensing. Along with advising other states’ efforts, Howarth chairs Nevada’s Foundational Subject Requirement and Performance Test Implementation Task Force and is a member of the Commission to Study the Administration of the Bar Examination and Licensing of Attorneys. The commission developed the Nevada Plan, a unique three-stage licensing process mimicking that of medical licensure.

The pair, who met in 2016, also is involved with the National Center for State Courts’ look at practical suggestions for licensure reform: They both sit on its Committee on Legal Education and Admissions Reform’s bar admissions working group.

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