Boomerdog, while I agree with Henschman that licensure shouldn't be required, I'll disagree with you that--if it is required--it should be done nationally, for a couple of reasons. One, there's no charter in the Constitution giving fed.gov the power to do such things (unless we want to stretch the interstate commerce clause past its intended use again), and two, different states have different legal traditions, so it makes a certain amount of sense that the state bar would want to test on its own law. There is some effort toward harmonizing the law between different states--see, for example, the various uniform and/or model codes that many states have adopted--and toward simplifying admission, in the form of the multistate bar exam and cross-state reciprocity, but there are still enough differences (Louisiana, I'm looking at you!) that if licensure is going to be a requirement, it ought to be handled at the state level.
