Welcome to the Judge Advocate General's Corps Military Law Education and BAR Preparation Program. This program is designed to take a student who may have little or no prior legal experience and provide the foundation necessary to understand military legal practice, prepare for certification, and successfully complete the Corps' BAR examination.
You are not expected to begin this program already knowing what words such as jurisdiction, motion, pleading, hearsay, remand, certiorari, precedent, authentication, or privilege mean. If you already know them, excellent. If you do not, that is precisely why this program exists.
The objective is not to turn students into people who can memorize hundreds of lines from a rulebook without understanding what any of them actually do. A lawyer who can quote Rule 82 perfectly but cannot recognize when Rule 82 applies is essentially a decorative filing cabinet with opinions.
The goal is to teach legal reasoning. By the end of the program, a successful student should be able to identify legal issues, locate the proper authority, understand the role of the attorney or judicial officer involved, recognize professional misconduct, understand court procedure, analyze evidence, prepare basic filings, understand appellate review, explain final review before the Judge Advocate General, and apply the law to factual situations.
The current official rulebooks, the Approved Version 2 Uniform Code of Military Justice, and controlling judicial precedent remain controlling. This program explains those authorities in simpler language and provides examples, but it does not replace the Code of Professional Conduct, the Rules of Practice and Procedure of the Judge Advocate General's Corps, the Rules of Evidence, controlling judicial precedent, or the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Knowledge questions may appear automatically throughout the program based upon the student's progress. Some may test the material currently being studied, while others may return to earlier concepts. That is intentional. Real legal problems rarely begin by announcing, "Attention, this is a Rule 14 question."