How Do You Get Admitted to the Louisiana Bar?

Bar admission in Louisiana is run by the Louisiana Supreme Court Committee on Bar Admissions, operating under Supreme Court Rule XVII.

The Committee is the body applicants deal with end to end — its pages at lascba.org carry the exam description, the application requirements and the fee schedule.

Louisiana writes its own exam.

It is not a UBE state: it does not give the UBE or the NextGen UBE, and it does not accept transferred UBE or NextGen scores.

Admission has two parts — a nine-part written exam (Part I) and the MPRE (Part II).

Part I covers nine subjects over three days: Civil Code I, II and III, Code of Civil Procedure, Torts, Business Entities, Constitutional Law, Criminal Law/Procedure/Evidence, and Federal Jurisdiction and Procedure; it is primarily essay and may include multiple-choice questions.

Applicants pass with a total weighted score of at least 650 out of 900, and the five Code subjects count double the four non-Code subjects.

Examinations 1 through 5 are the Code exams, on the Civil Code and the Code of Civil Procedure, and examinations 6 through 9 are the non-Code papers — the Code weighting is the practical point for a lawyer trained elsewhere, because with no waiver route into Louisiana, preparing for this bar means preparing the Civil Code and Code of Civil Procedure papers along with everything else.

Rule XVII requires applicants to be graduates of a law school located in the United States or its territories that is accredited by the American Bar Association.

Graduates of foreign law schools go through an equivalency process that requires 14 semester hours at an ABA school.

One older claim you may still run into — that Louisiana makes out-of-state graduates take extra civil-law courses before they can sit — is not something the rule text we read supports: Section 3 of Rule XVII as we read it requires only the ABA-accredited J.D.

Confirm your own eligibility with the Committee before you file.

Louisiana requires a scaled score of 80 or higher on the MPRE, and a passing score stays valid for five years from the date of the examination.

The MPRE is Part II of Louisiana's two-part admission process.

Lawyers admitted elsewhere who passed the MPRE there and are CLE-compliant may be treated as meeting the requirement.

Louisiana bar applicants must complete a character report from the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE), and Louisiana law students start theirs in their second year of law school.

The NCBE charges its own fee for the report, separate from the Committee's application fee.

Our research did not establish how the Committee weighs individual items in a report, so questions about a specific history belong with the Committee on Bar Admissions.

No. Rule XVII says no person shall be admitted to the bar of this state based solely on admission to the bar of another state, and NCBE lists Louisiana as accepting neither legacy UBE nor NextGen UBE scores.

Louisiana has no admission on motion and no reciprocity route.

The one narrow exception is the limited in-house counsel license: lawyers admitted elsewhere who work in-house for a non-legal-services employer can apply to the Committee's in-house counsel program for $975, and the license is valid four years.

For everyone else, sitting the Louisiana exam is the route.

The exam application fee is $975 for first-time applicants and for re-applicants as of October 2026, and late filing adds $850.

Louisiana law students who registered in their second year pay $150 at registration and an $850 supplemental later.

NCBE lists Louisiana's first filing deadline as February 1 for the July exam (late May 15) and November 1 for the February exam (late December 15).

For the July 2026 exam, 520 examinees sat, 70% passed overall and 78% of first-time takers passed, with results released October 2, 2026; the July 2025 exam was 75% overall and 82% first-time.

Check the Committee's site for the current fee schedule and each administration's results date.