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.