Writing for the Bar, Day 2

So much for the big blizzard. It's 11:30 am and it's not even that cold out. I ended up washing my hair last night, so I'm sleep-deprived now. Of course, it didn't help that my insane cats were chasing each other all over the apartment at 6 am this morning. (A friend told me he didn't get to sleep till 5 though- I think he wins.)

The first exam question, the one we went over, was a disaster. I didn't plan enough before I started writing, and ended up wasting most of the time on stuff that I realized later was unimportant. It's all well and good to write that way when you have 90 minutes for a question, but 25? Nuh-uh. I also realized, to my chagrin, that I missed half the question- I only addressed liability without touching damages. Ouch.

The three we handed in went a little better, although I know the only reason I was able to leave so early was because I bolloxed things up. It'll be helpful to see WHAT I bolloxed up though. The one thing that really upset me was a question involving a dispute between a landowner and her boyfriend and developers who had created a drainage system for their upstream properties that was now fouling the stream and causing it to flood. I was to assess the developers' defenses against trespass, nuisance, and...breach of riparian rights? What the eff? I actually wrote in the book that I had never in my life heard that term before, which under the circumstances (ungraded practice essay) seemed the most concise way to explain I wasn't going to be answering that portion of the question. After class, I asked someone in the bathroom who informed me that riparian rights had "something to do with water rights of landowners." So it's a property term...great.

I'll buy that on the bar exam, but it seems a little unfair when you explicitly told us you'd be giving us torts and contracts questions to throw property in there. But what's most frustrating to me is that I really haven't ever heard that term before. My property teacher, whom I like as a person and enjoy talking to, is widely regarded as completely useless in that subject. Now that I'm finding out the vast number of things I don't know about property, I'm beginning to agree. So it seems the stuff you have to learn leading up to the exam isn't so much the result of not taking classes (I've taken every bar-tested class) but the result of incompetent teaching.

Is Umd this weird? I'd really like to know. I'm not going to name names, but UBalt has the most weird and uneven teaching staff. And it's not just along tenure-adjunct lines. We have tenure professors who are superb teachers and excellent in their subjects, and we have tenure professors who couldn't teach their way out of a paper bag. We have adjunct professors who are interesting and knowledgeable and good at teaching, and adjuncts who are useless as all hell. For example, right now I have one superb adjunct, one shitty adjunct, and one below-average long-term adjunct. To put this confusing person in front of first-years and expect them to learn the law is a crime- but the school does it every year. It's really very frustrating when you drop 80 grand on an education this uneven.

Sometimes I really wish our country had more specific licensing. The general v. specific licensing debate is usually something you cover one day in professional responsibility and then no one ever talks about again. And yes, it's nice to be able to do any kind of law once you're licensed. But there are not nice things on both sides. First, there's nothing to stop an ignorant member of the public from asking their Uncle Fred, long-time sports lawyer, to handle their custody dispute and nothing to stop Uncle Fred from agreeing to take the case...except for his common sense, which Uncle Fred does not necessarily have. Second, those of us who know what we want to do (in my case, criminal law) are forced to waste their time studying things like formation of business partnerships and (because I'm still angry and frustrated) breach of riparian rights. Sometimes I am so bored and frustrated in commercial law that it's hard to stop myself standing up and screaming "Who cares???" I mean, sometimes we do divert from the area of practice we intend to have a career in, but I know for a fact that if I ever have to engage in banking law for a living, I will buy a gun and shoot myself in the head. But it's on the bar.

...I have a lot of work ahead of me. Next week's assignment is agency. At least we just finished that in Biz Orgs, so I know something about it. Unlike breach of riparian rights.

I am so tired

Just finishing up my 6-midnight shift at work. I'm not going to be in bed till at least 1, and then I have class at 9. Maybe I'll forego the shower and just braid my hair. It'll look greasy, but I'm not sure that I really care.

But enough of my personal hygiene concerns. I finished the assignment for the Writing for the Bar class, with the help of the Conviser Mini-Review. Evidently we DID study some of these things in Torts...For example, I distinctly remember discussing public necessity and private necessity in terms of trespass to land and chattels. I also recall several cases involving city employees breaking things out of public necessity and a spirited argument over whether the city should have had to pay damages despite their having a valid reason to commit trespass. I guess this is just one of the things I did not put on my outline because it seemed so obvious. Obviously trespass to land requires (1) trespass (2) to land. And intent and causation, but those are givens for intentional torts, really. That goes to show how much I know. Sadly, I've been discovering that what seems really obvious after a semester of classes on a topic seems much less obvious 2 years later.

I'm not sure whether I'll remember enough of this tomorrow to make the essay-writing worthwhile, what with the exhaustion and the brain death. But we'll see. Frankly I'm sort of hoping the snow that's being predicted for noon will unexpectedly strike around 7 am and they'll have to close the school. Then I could sleep in. But it seems rather unlikely.

At least I know that if I remember nothing else, I'll have the fact that Maryland uses contributory negligence, not comparative negligence. (Isn't it weird how your brain picks up these odd points and just clings to them?)

All righty then

In the first Writing for the Bar class, they gave us a homework assignment to prepare us to do practice essays next class. Essentially the assignment consists of listing basic factoids about tort and contract law, such as the elements and defenses for a list of intentional torts, and the significance of consideration. Basic stuff, right? In trying to do this assignment tonight, I learned two things:

1. I don't remember nearly as much as I thought I did. Not terribly surprising, but disheartening nonetheless.
2. My first-year outlines are for shit. This is not surprising in the least- I had yet to recognize the value of outlining as a study tool (writing outlines helps me learn) and I was not thinking about when I would be struggling to recall this information for the bar exam with little more to guide me than a half-ass outline and pages of near-illegible notes (interspersed with sketches and random scribbling).

Still, it's enough to make me want to travel back to 2003 and slap myself right in the face. Comparing my torts outline to this assignment, I'm extremely annoyed- people always said my torts professor was bad, and I defended her, but now I think I agree. I don't even remember covering half these torts and they sure aren't in my outline- nuisance? Inteference with contract? Huh? In the case of contracts, I know it's my fault. For a start, my professor was excellent...and there's also the fact that my outline cuts off in mid-phrase. Thanks a lot, younger me. Then, my outlines seem to exist in an organizational world entirely my own. They bear no resemblence to the structure of the homework assignment. So, yeah, we'll be hitting the Barbri outlines this weekend to fill in the gaps. I'll dig out my old notes, too, but I doubt they'll help. (My notes are so bad that I feel obliged to offer a disclaimer to classmates who copy them after an absence. Like my outlines, they exist in a realm that makes sense only to the version of myself that existed in late 2003.)

Anyway, I'm thinking I'm going to establish a warming-up period this semester...schedule a couple hours each weekend (maybe it should be more, but I doubt my ability to enforce more than that upon myself) to start bar prep. Maybe Saturday afternoon would be good. I think that would help, both in terms of preparation and in terms of getting all the oh my god I can't do this I'm going to live in a cardboard box ahhhhhh out of my system before we get close enough to the exam that it'll make me choke.