“A Bar Association of Our Own”
In 1978, a spirited group of younger Diné (Navajo) attorneys and tribal court advocates created the Navajo Nation Bar Association (NNBA). Founding NNBA members included four future Navajo Supreme Court justices (Robert Yazzie, Tom Tso, Raymond Austin, and Homer Bluehouse) and two future Navajo Nation presidents, Peterson Zah and Albert Hale.
Hale served as the NNBA’s founding president. This was just one year after graduating from the University of New Mexico Law School in 1977, where he and Yazzie had been part of the inaugural Pre-Law Summer Institute (PLSI), a program that continues to support aspiring Native American lawyers to this day. ;A frequent speaker at NNBA conferences, Hale—who served as Navajo Nation president before being elected to the Arizona General Assembly—described the original NNBA Bar Exam held in 1978 as one page of multiple-choice questions that took fewer than 30 minutes to complete and grade. “We wanted a bar association of our own, so we started having meetings to write bylaws and an exam,” he recalled over four decades later.
LINKS
Read “The Navajo Nation Bar Exam: Adapting Traditional Law to Modern Legal Practice,” authored by Troy A. Eid for The Bar Examiner.