The word “bar” is defined in the dictionary as “anything that hinders or prevents” anything unworthy from passing, and also as “a place of judgment” in which one, after being given reasonable opportunity to prove himself, is tested. Only those who hurdle the bar are given the crown of glory.
Bar exams are therefore a kind of hurdle that prevents those who cannot safely be licensed to practice law from joining the legal profession. They are a place for testing or judging the worth of those seeking to become lawyers. In Tennyson’s famous poem “Crossing the Bar,” the word is used in the same sense for, in Christian theology, when one dies one stands before the bar of Divine Justice in order to be judged.
