Applicants wishing to take the Virginia Bar Exam must follow a strict dress code. More specifically, the Virginia Board of Bar Examiners requires that test-takers wear “court-appropriate attire,” which the Board defines as “a suit or jacket with tie, a dress, skirt and jacket or pant suit.” And the consequences for not following the dress code are strict. According to the Board, “[v]iolation of the mandatory dress code will result in your dismissal from the exam site and the disqualification of your exam.”

The "court-appropriate attire" requirement is outdated, petty, paternalistic, and serves no important function. The testing site is not a courtroom or a law office; there are no judges, juries, or clients present. What a bar applicant wears to take a test has absolutely no bearing on their professionalism or their future performance as a lawyer. 

The men and women taking the bar exam have invested three years of their lives and tens-to-hundreds of thousands of dollars in their legal educations—just for the chance to take this test. The only thing they should be worried about is their score—not about whether they'll get kicked out for wearing the wrong thing.

The pandemic has caused the legal profession to innovate and to rethink so many of our longstanding "rules" and practices. The Virginia Bar Exam’s dress code is a practice whose time has come and gone. The Board of Bar Examiners should eliminate it.