Like most people 87 years of age, Porter Davis is running out of time.
“This year is probably my last chance,” he said. “A lot can happen when you’re 87.”
Davis said he is trying to tie up loose ends in his life. The biggest loose end from his nearly nine decades on Earth is passing the California bar exam and becoming a lawyer. There may be 1.3 million lawyers in the U.S., according to the American Bar Association but, Davis said with a sigh, none of them is him.
As a young man in the 1960s, he attended two law schools and took the bar exam four times. He flunked out of one of the law schools. He also flunked the bar exam, all four times.
That was then, Davis said. With a lifetime of experience, he’s smarter now. He’s ready to try again — if a technical impasse with the State Bar gets resolved.
“I believe in being optimistic,” he said. The exam will be administered Monday and Tuesday.
Davis, a retired real estate broker and former construction worker from Larkspur, dug up all his old law books. He paid $2,500 for a bar exam study course consisting of 12 more law books. He’s studying, at least several minutes every day.
Davis recently sat down at an outdoor cafe near his home to show how a man who is running out of time studies for an exam. Davis, who says he is the oldest person ever to take the bar exam, picked up the first of his 12 exam-prep books and began turning the pages quickly. He looked at each page for about one second, before turning to the next page.
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“I’m getting a mental image of the material,” he said. “I’m taking a photograph that goes into your subconscious mind.”
It took him a full half minute to study the first 30 pages of the book.
“I don’t believe in memorizing things,” Davis said.
It might be a moot point, as they say in his prospective trade, because of a bunch of red tape at the State Bar. The exam registrar sent Davis a form letter saying the office couldn’t find records of the four bar exams that Davis flunked in the 1960s, which would have entitled him to try again.
Transcripts from the second of the two law schools Davis attended, which also would entitle him to try again, have also gone missing. (Davis does have four years of law school transcripts from two schools, The Chronicle confirmed.)
The registrar refunded Davis his $830 bar exam fee.
“Pursuant to Rule 4.26,” the letter said, employing the kind of language that lawyers like to use, “you are not eligible to take the 2020 bar examination.”
Davis doesn’t want his $830 back. He wants to be a lawyer partly, he said, because he has six former wives and being a lawyer might come in handy. You never know.
When he called the bar exam registrar, Davis said he was told that exam records from the 1960s were all on paper, not on computers, and that his records could not be found. Davis said he was asked if he could prove that he had taken the bar exams in the 1960s by producing the letters he received from the bar at the time that said he had flunked.
“I had thrown them away,” he said. “It was too painful.”
A spokeswoman for the state bar, Teresa Ruano, said any applicant who flunks is permitted to retake the bar exam, but that she could not provide specifics about Davis.
“All applicant information is confidential,” Ruano said.
This year, about 10,000 people will take the California bar exam and, based on past results, about 6,000 of them will flunk. Because of the pandemic, applicants will take the test at home and must agree to be monitored by their computer video cameras, to make sure they are not looking up answers.
Davis said he is not giving up. He has already contacted a lawyer, the kind that files lawsuits on behalf of people who have suffered a wrongful act, which he said he knows from his studies is called a tort and which the State Bar ought to know, too.
And he contacted the office of his state Assemblyman, Marc Levine, D-Marin County, who assigned a staff member to look into Davis’ missing records claim. Levine said he would do what he could.
“We’re going to ask the bar to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s,” Levine said. “This is still a work in progress. I really respect what Mr. Davis is trying to do. He’s got a lot of guts.”
Davis, who knows most of what is in the First Amendment will need to move fast to master the differences between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. He’s flipping the pages faster than ever.
“I’m weighing my options,” Davis said. “But I’m not going to be a milquetoast. And I’m not going to take ‘no’ for an answer.”
Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SteveRubeSF
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October 04, 2020 at 06:00PM
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‘Probably my last chance’: 87-year-old seeks one last try at bar exam - San Francisco Chronicle
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