US Doctors to be Waived in to Israel- JPost

According to a JPost article, US doctors who have passed the USMLE need not take the Israeli medical licensing exam but will be waived in.

The exemption from the local licensing exam will be retroactive, granting a license to whoever has passed the USMLE in the past decade.

This is the first time that Israeli health authorities have accepted foreign test results for an MD license.

But someone who has taken an Israeli licensing exam and failed may not ask to take the USMLE exam and receive an exemption; he will be able, however, to resit the local exam instead.

I don't expect to see a similar rule for lawyers anytime soon. First of all, Israel seems to need more doctors so this will help ease the shortage while there is a glut of lawyers in the country. Second, the human body is the same in every country and medicine is fairly standardized whereas the legal system in the US and Israel, while similar, has many differences. On the other hand, lawyers who have passed the bar exam in one of the 50 states and has 5 years of experience need not pass the Israeli bar even if they can barely read Hebrew or know anything about the Israeli legal system. One can always hope...

Schedule for Dinei Yisrael Review Courses Posted

As a follow up to a previous post regarding this year's Dinei Yisrael exams for foreign qualified lawyers seeking to be admitted to the Israeli Bar, I just found the schedule for the Jerusalem review classes for the Dinei Yisrael Exam on the Bar Office's website.

It appears that Professor Yoel Tsur is stepping in for David Seville and organizing things this year.

The classes will be held at the Jerusalem Law Centre, 1 Chopin street- bus no. 13.

To register, contact The Israel Bar, Jerusalem, tel. 02-5411200, fax: 02-5610062  e-mail: mitmahim@israelbar.prg.il.

The charge for the course is: 200 NIS 1-2 subjects; 500NIS 3 subjects or more. And each exam costs 160 NIS.


And I have learned from Professor Tsur that even if you took the course in the past but failed the exam and want to take the course again, you must pay again. I'm not sure that's how David Saville did it and I definitely don't like that policy. I guess they don't guarantee your passage like BarBri.

The Bar Gets Higher: Record Low Bar Passage Rate in Israel

News outlets are reporting that preliminary results show that only about 50% of those who took the Israeli Bar Exam last week successfully passed the test. (See the hebrew article at The Marker here.) The average score was a 64 out of 100, and the passing grade is a 65.

Is this the Bar Association's way of thinning the herd and dealing with the problem of too many lawyers?

Does an overly difficult exam violate students' basic right to freedom of occupation?

The students who took the exam are weighing their options, including appealing the fairness of some of the question, suing the Bar Association, and protesting.

There are other countries with harder exams. The bar passage rate last year in Japan was 25% and two law schools in that country reported that none of their graduates passed the exam. See the article from the ABA Journal here. And I've seen some people writing that Brazil's bar passage rate is even lower but I didn't see a reliable source for that claim.