A newsletter by Reuters and Westlaw

By Diana Novak Jones, Mike Scarcella and Sara Merken

Good morning. Harvard Law School emerged with the highest first-time bar pass rate in 2024. Plus, two federal judges ordered a group of agencies to reinstate tens of thousands of probationary employees who were fired, and President Donald Trump took the fight over his attempt to restrict automatic U.S. birthright citizenship to the U.S. Supreme Court. Let’s get started.

Were you forwarded this email? Subscribe here.

REUTERS/Brian Snyder

In a year of strong bar exam results nationwide, Harvard Law School emerged with the highest first-time pass rate in 2024 — with 97.86% of its Juris Doctor graduates passing the attorney licensing exam on their first attempt, our colleague Karen Sloan reports. All but 13 of the 608 Harvard law grads who took the attorney licensing exam for the first time last year were successful.

The 2024 national first-time pass rate rose to nearly 83% from 79% in 2023, according to new data from the American Bar Association. Right on Harvard’s heels was Duke Law School, with a 97.48% first-time pass rate, followed by the University of Chicago Law School at 97.42%, and New York University School of Law at 96.72%. 

Three law schools in Texas were among the 15 schools with the highest 2024 pass rates, including Texas A&M University School of Law, University of Texas Law School and Baylor University School of Law. 

—That’s the number of days Hilary Perkins spent as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s top lawyer before resigning amid criticism from Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who called her a “Biden abortion lawyer.” Perkins, who joined the DOJ in 2019, previously defended the abortion pill mifepristone during former President Joe Biden's administration. Read more here.

As the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in recent days has moved to dismiss at least 10 cases accusing companies of cheating consumers and paused about two dozen others pending internal review, it doesn’t mean defendants are off the hook -- at least not entirely. Plaintiffs lawyers and state AGs are targeting some of the same misconduct, but consumer advocates tell Jenna Greene in On the Case that the CFPB leaves an enforcement void that will be hard to fill.

—U.S. District Judge William Alsup in a Thursday court hearing, where he ordered six U.S. agencies to reinstate thousands of probationary employees who were fired as part of President Donald Trump's purge of the federal workforce, our colleagues Daniel Wiessner and Nate Raymond report. A federal judge in Maryland issued a broader reinstatement order later that same day.