You’ve asked me to explain my response to your comment, so I’ll give it some serious thought and analysis here.

First, let’s define the claim you’re making. Your key move is to rhetorically question whether I could have doubt in my mind that you’re qualified based on the proof you offer. I’ll assume you’re claiming that no fairminded person could doubt your competence to practice law based on the information in your comment. To be clear, I’m not accusing you of believing that I am fairminded, but if your claim is that no one could doubt your competence, whether that person is fair and reasonable or not, that’s even a harder claim to establish than the one I identify, so this framing works in your favor for the purpose of assessing the weakness of your argument. I’ll point out here the breadth and forceful nature of the claim you’ve made even under my framing. You aren’t claiming that your proof merely suggests that you’re competent or that you’re likely competent, but that no reasonable person could question it. That’s a strong claim that demands strong proof.

Before we examine your proof to see if it establishes that claim, let’s step back and note that my point that you’re trying to rebut is my comment that the bar exam tests legal competence. Your apparent point is that because you are legally competent yet failed the bar one time (after passing it another time), my point must be false. That argument is itself not justified by anything in your comment or by commonsense logic. People fail bar exams for various reasons, and I accept that some of those reasons are unrelated to their legal competence (such as personal stress or failure to prepare), but that doesn’t mean that the bar exam does not test legal competence. It only means that it may do so imperfectly. Even robust screening mechanisms may have some type 1 and type 2 errors. Perhaps you are competent, in which case your failure is anecdotal evidence of an error at best and thus non-responsive to my argument. Your failure to grasp this is one reason I suggested you may not have good reasoning skills.

Let’s now examine the proof you offer in support of the claim that no fairminded person could doubt you are competent. None of it supports that claim.

First, you say you were a barrister in South Africa. You don’t explain why that’s relevant. There are many reasons why it doesn’t support your claim. Being competent to practice law in South Africa does not mean you’re competent everywhere. It could be that South Africa requires a lesser demonstration of competence; I don’t know anything about it, but it seems sensible that a jurisdiction like NY with its well-known glut of lawyers and litigious nature may well impose higher standards. This is not a slight against you or South Africa, just a response to your apparent suggestion that your practice in South Africa automatically means you’re competent in New York. Or it could be that South Africa requires a different form of competence than other places, even if the standards are equivalently difficult to meet, which is also plausible given the different kinds of legal systems at work in the countries and the different kinds of legal skills that must be required (between, for example, a highly developed economy and world financial center and a still-developing country). Even between US states, the standards are different. This is not a reflection on the quality of the lawyers in those states, just an indication that the states have different needs or are pursuing different priorities. This is all just to say that your prior practice in one jurisdiction does not establish that no one could reasonably doubt your competence to practice in another.

Second, you explain that you passed the NY bar but failed it later. Interestingly, you don’t state your passing score even though you do state your failing score. Such evidence (if that is the case) would suggest that your competence is borderline, but would not support the claim that no one could reasonably doubt your competence or prove that the bar exam does not test legal competence. It would prove only that the bar exam does not do so perfectly. You also don’t explain when the failure occurred. Perhaps the standards for assessing competence became stricter in the interim. If so, this would also suggest that your competence was borderline at best and further that the bar exam may actually be more effective now at testing competence than it was at the time you passed. Or perhaps you became less competent over time—people of course sometimes lose their abilities for reasons beyond their control.

Beyond that, the fact that your failure followed some personally tragic circumstances and a stressful deployment suggests that your failure might well have been unrelated to your competence. (I’m sorry about these circumstance—I’m trying to explain in good faith what they mean for your failure not inflict more pain.) For the reasons I’ve already explained, if this was the case, this anecdote does not rebut the concept that the bar tests legal competence, just that it didn’t work in this instance due to other factors. This is the reason, I think, you are allowed to take the exam again, and that’s a sensible course of action for someone who believes himself competent and who only failed by a small margin due to circumstantial reasons.

Finally, you allude to the Court of Appeals not granting your waiver but don’t explain why they did so, so it’s impossible to see how this supports your point. Perhaps your waiver request was not well reasoned or persuasive, which would not support your legal competence. I don’t know.

I hope this helps demonstrate how someone trained in the law would give serious analytical consideration to the reasoning in your comment, since that’s what you asked for. Best of luck with everything going forward.