Municipality Playing Hardball with Nursery School Teachers

Recently, a friend of mine asked me about a 3-year non-compete clause his nursery teacher wife was asked by the city of Jerusalem to sign.

Last year, the Knesset passed a new law providing for free nursery school education for 3 and 4 year olds (see article here.)  In order to immediately implement this law, the city asked local nursery teachers who already had private classes in their apartments if they wanted to fill the positions available for the city nurseries. Many of these women already had established reputations in their neighborhoods. Now, they could go to work for the city and bring their clientele with them.

My friend's wife had been running her own nursery program for a few years and applied for a position and was accepted. She recruited children for the class but had not yet signed a contract with the city. When she received the contract, she was surprised to see that it had a 3-year non-compete clause that looked something like this:

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.