Possible SCOTUS pick failed bar four years ago

If Stanford Law professor Kathleen Sullivan is nominated to the Supreme Court, she’ll likely have to answer at least one embarrassing question during her confirmation hearing: How did she fail the California bar exam?

Sullivan, who’s rumored to be on Obama’s SCOTUS short list, failed the test just four years ago while serving as a professor at Stanford Law School.

At the time, Sullivan, a former dean of Stanford Law, was already licensed to practice in Massachusetts and New York. She took the test after joining an appellate firm in California. After failing the July 2005 test, she passed in February 2006 after taking her preparation more seriously.

“I am eating, drinking and sleeping the bar,” Sullivan told the LA Times before her second test.

Sullivan is considered a brilliant legal scholar and authored of one of the nation’s most widely used case law textbooks. But failing the test did have consequences: in January 2006, she was removed from a $500 million lawsuit for not having passed the bar.

In Sullivan’s defense, the California exam is known as one of the most difficult in the nation. More than half of those who sit for it fail.