In December, we blogged press reports about former Stanford Dean Kathleen Sullivan’s failure of the July 2005 California Bar Exam.  Today’s L.A. Times (A High Bar for Lawyers) reports that Dean Sullivan is taking no chances this time as she and 5259 others sit for the three-day exam beginning today:

Kathleen Sullivan, former dean of Stanford Law School and a former Harvard Law School professor, is considered such a legal superstar that news of her flunking the California bar last year made the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Sullivan remains a full law professor at Stanford and is associated with a private law firm.

Although Sullivan is licensed to practice law in New York and Massachusetts, the California Supreme Court last month removed her from litigation over a $500-million licensing dispute because she was not a member of the state bar.

The constitutional scholar, who has argued several times before the U.S. Supreme Court, wasn’t eager to talk about the setback, declining to say how much she studied for the bar or how close she came to passing. "That is all past," Sullivan said. She took a special bar exam for lawyers licensed elsewhere that is shorter than the regular test. Only 28% achieved passing scores. This time, Sullivan is not taking any chances. She said she has immersed herself in study for the test today. "I am eating, drinking and sleeping the bar," said the scholar, who is frequently cited as a potential U.S. Supreme Court nominee….

Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, a former California governor who is running for the Democratic nomination for state attorney general, flunked the bar after "studying a little bit, not too much," following his graduation from Yale Law School. The exam had questions about community property and wills and estates, subjects Brown had not studied at Yale, and did not reflect the psychiatry and law course that Brown said he took with the daughter of Sigmund Freud or the class in Roman law taught by a famous Oxford scholar. "Yale was more of an intellectual exercise," said Brown, who passed the second time in 1965.

(Hat Tip:  Peter Lattman’s WSJ Law Blog.)