Pass the Bar! provides a comprehensive overview of the pre-bar review, bar review, and bar exam process. The authors demystify the bar exam process and take readers through the steps they need to follow to succeed.
Readers are given specific information about what to do during the year before their bar exams; checklists, exercises, and reflection questions; tips for studying and completing practice questions; and sample exam questions and answers to maximize their likelihood of bar exam success.
The book has been designed with several uses in mind:
- As the text for a for-credit law school bar preparation course;
- As a supplemental text for an upper-level doctrinal course, allowing professors to build students' bar study skills in the context of learning a bar-tested subject;
- As a text for non-credit bar preparation workshops; or
- For students' independent study.
The authors' recommendations are grounded in educational and psychological research as well as their personal experiences in designing programs and preparing thousands of students to pass their bar exams. Readers will find the text user-friendly and its recommendations straightforward and practical.
"Once in awhile the perfect book comes along at the perfect time. Pass the Bar! is just such a book, arriving at the ideal time to help law students clear the last hurdle of the race they began when they started law school. The authors' approach is both logical and powerful, and would immediately enhance any bar taker's likelihood of success. I will happily recommend the book to generations of students as they prepare to cross the finish line of their challenging bar exam race." ― Professor Ruth Ann McKinney, Director of the Writing and Learning Resources Center, The University of North Carolina School of Law
After serving eight years as the 10th Dean of the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law from 2017-2025, Michael Hunter Schwartz resumed his full-time faculty role as Professor of Law. He is a Consultant for the Institute for Law Teaching and Learning and has been teaching law since 1991. He is the author of Contracts: A Context and Practice Casebook (Carolina Academic Press, 2009), Expert Learning for Law Students (2d ed., Carolina Academic Press, 2008), Pass the Bar! (Carolina Academic Press, 2006), Teaching Law by Design: Engaging Students from the Syllabus to the Final Exam (Carolina Academic Press, 2009), and What the Best Law Teachers Do (Harvard University Press, 2011). He also is a named contributing author to Best Practices for Legal Education (CLEA 2007), and he has authored three law review pieces and several shorter works addressing various law teaching and learning topics. Professor Schwartz has delivered more than two dozen conference presentations on a wide variety of teaching and learning topics and has served as a consultant and/or invited speaker at more than two dozen law schools throughout the country.
