What branch of the federal government does the Bar Association belong

Question

I can't find the BAR listed as any government agency. I was wondering what branch of government it belongs to

Answer 1

canada

I am assuming you are asking about the regulating body for lawyers. In Canada, these are known as law societies rather than bar associations (as they are called in the various states).

A provincial law society is not part of the judiciary, the legislative branch, or the executive.

Nonetheless, they are considered to be performing the functions of "government" such that their rules and decision-making are subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

See e.g. Re Klein and Law Society of Upper Canada Re Dvorak and Law Society of Upper Canada (1985) 50 O.R. (2d) 118:

The Law Society is a statutory authority exercising its jurisdiction in the public interest and is not, as was suggested in argument, a private body whose powers derive from some vague form of contract or articles of association found in the mists of antiquity. In promulgating rules relating to legal advertising or relations between the press and Bar, the Law Society is performing a regulatory function on behalf of the "Legislature and government" of Ontario within the meaning of s. 32 of the Charter. In so doing it is regulating not only the rights of the lawyer to speak, but also the rights of the potential client and the public at large to be informed. In my view, the fact that the Rules and commentaries in the Code of Professional Conduct have not been adopted as regulations under the Law Society Act does not prevent them from falling within the ambit of the Charter.

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In Canada there is another kind of organization called a "bar association" (e.g. the Canadian Bar Association) which is more like a voluntary trade organization rather than the regulating body. This answer is not about those.

Answer 2

none

In most countries, the Bar is an association of lawyers, with or without corporation status. Often, membership is mandatory by law, but that does not make the bar a governmental agency.

That does not mean that a bar does not have special powers that could have been governmental, but they are special associations and not part of the government as a branch (e.g. judicative, executive, legislative) or agency (e.g. some governments can order specific rules).

Answer 3

united-states

What branch of the federal government does the Bar Association belong?

Terminology

The term "bar", as related to lawyers (derived from the railing midway in most courtroom that segregate areas where only lawyers and their clients are allowed to be from areas open to the general public) is used in more than one sense.

One sense is the collective body of people admitted to practice law in a particular jurisdiction or court.

Another sense is the subset of lawyers admitted to practice in a particular jurisdiction or court who actively do so on a regular basis (e.g. the "probate bar" that practices regularly in courts of probate jurisdiction).

A third sense is a membership association of lawyers who join together to advance their common interests (e.g. lobbying on legal issues and judicial appointments, offering continuing education classes, organizing committees to provide input into very legal practice area matters, publishing practical practice guide oriented publications to their members, and helping lawyer to obtain services like health insurance and legal malpractice insurance).

Which agency is primarily in charge of professional licensing for lawyers?

Admission to the practice of law is regulated predominantly by state government, and is usually administered by the highest court of the state, even in states with integrated bar associations. This is because the highest court of a state is usually responsible for the administration of the court system in the state and the regulation of lawyers, in addition to its judicial responsibilities.

For example, state supreme courts and the U.S. Supreme Court also handle H.R., budget, I.T., courthouse maintenance and construction, and ruling making issues for their respective court systems. Sometimes, these administrative responsibilities are purely the job of the chief justice of the highest court, and the other justices on that court have only the usual judicial functions of a judge.

Sometimes there is an independent state government agency that regulates lawyers, but even then, this agency is usually under the supervision of the state's highest court. Thus, the regulation of lawyers is primarily the function of the state judicial branch.

In the United States, there are two kinds of state bar associations: integrated (a.k.a. mandatory a.k.a. unified) bar associations, which include all lawyers admitted to practice, and voluntary bar associations, which are membership organizations that do not include all lawyers admitted to practice, with admission to the practice of law regulated separately.

In some jurisdictions with integrated bars, lawyers are allowed to self-regulate to some extent, independent of the highest court in the jurisdiction. But even then, the highest state court can usually withdraw that authority from the integrated bar association, or regulate how the integrated bar association exercises this authority, if the highest state court decides that the integrated bar association isn't handling this responsibility well.

Federal courts and the ABA

There is no national bar admission system (except for admission to the patent law bar, which practices before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a federal executive branch agency that regulates admission to its own bar).

The American Bar Association is a private national voluntary membership organization that is not involved in the admission of lawyers to the practice of law.

In the federal courts, admission to practice before a particular court is handled by that court. Every single U.S. District Court, every single U.S. Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court all have their own separate rules for admission to practice, and you must be admitted to practice separately in each of them to practice in them.

But admission to practice as a lawyer in a state court is a prerequisite to admission to practice in any federal court (with rare exceptions for foreign lawyers, typically on a case by case pro hac vice basis that requires the foreign lawyer to affiliate with a lawyer already admitted to practice before that federal court).

Federal courts do not separately require passage of a bar exam and do not conduct an independent character and fitness review of prospective lawyers. Generally, admission to the bar of a federal court requires a recommendation from a lawyer already admitted to practice in that court, proof of admission to practice in some state court (or in the courts for the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico or another self-governing U.S. territory, which function as states for this purpose), registration of contact information with the court, signing up for the court's e-filing system (sometimes with a brief e-filing competency test), and payment of a small membership fee. The sole purposes of federal admission to practice are to have a comprehensive directory of lawyers admitted to practice before that court and to permit those lawyers to be disbarred from practice before that court, if they engage in violations of professional ethics.

What Does Admission To The Practice Of Law Involve?

A private organization, affiliated with but not actually a part of the American Bar Association (a private voluntary membership organization of lawyers), has developed the Multi-State Bar Exam and a multi-state professional ethics exam (both of which are multiple choice tests based upon national majority rules of law), which are used together with state specific essay exams in state specific law, to determine whether new law school graduates with be admitted to the practice of law. States also require new lawyers to undergo an exhaustive background check, called a character and fitness examination.

The main exception to the bar exam requirement is Wisconsin which allows graduates of its own state law schools to skip the bar exam.

Most, but not all states, also allow lawyers who have actively practices law in another state for at least five years to skip the bar exam (but sometimes not the multi-state professional ethics exam, and usually not the character and fitness examination). This process is called "reciprocity" because admission to practice of a lawyer admitted to practice in another state is usually only allowed for lawyers admitted to practice in a state that offers the admitting state's lawyers the same courtesy.

Historical Footnote

The practice of law was not always a licensed profession in the United States.

The requirement to be admitted to practice as a lawyer at a state level, following a law school education or an equivalent level of training in an apprenticeship format "reading law" with a licensed lawyer, began around the 1870s and quickly spread nationwide. This was also that time that law school education in a formal law school largely replaced the apprenticeship model of "reading law". The curriculum of law schools was largely based upon the curriculum adopted at Harvard Law School at that time and this continues to be the basic framework of law school education today, although there have been minor tweaks to it.

Prior to that, admission to the practice of law was similar to federal court bar admission today. A prospective lawyer in those days was admitted to practice on a court by court basis, usually solely on the basis of a recommendation of a lawyer already admitted to practice before that court (often the admitted lawyer under whom the apprentice "reading law" was trained).

Both the historical U.S. system and the current one differ significantly from the system for the admission of barristers through a system involving the Inns of Court, and solicitors to the practice of law in England and Wales, the legal system upon which the U.S. legal system was based. This is because it simply wasn't practicable in the U.S. to operate that tradition and institution bound system in the British colonies that became the United States. The history of the English legal professions is summarized in a 1944 law review article.