The establishment of a regulation requiring initial licensees and established dentists to take a jurisprudence exam would seem, on first blush, to be a great idea.  Who would deny that "knowing the law" is good thing, and for initial licensees, it is a probably a valid approach to establish baseline knowledge of legal issues and the laws governing the practice of dentistry.  For the practicing dentist, to cause this to rise to the level of proposing a regulation, however, the Board of Dentistry must have certain violations in mind that they see over and over, situations that they feel that with better understanding of the law would decrease over time (and yes, I agree that decreasing the workload of the Board is a very reasonable goal because one interpretation of that is that patients are being better treated within the parameters of Board rules and regulations).  Would it not be a better approach to create a document (newsletter, mailer, etc.) that outlines the Board's concerns?  This would have the dual effect of 1) not adding another regulation to the many thousands on the books already in the Commonwealth, and 2) not burdening the established practitioner with a time-consuming test.  The Board could tailor their information to those topics that would have the most impact on the knowledge base of practicing dentists.