It is finished.

Multiple choice today and it was a bitch. I have no idea how I did so don't even ask. All I know is it that the morning session was extremely surreal, I spent the lunch break lying on my back by the fountain wondering if I was falling asleep or starting to hallucinate, and I finished the afternoon an hour early, so I'm home early. I can't tell you how much pleasure it gives me every time I look at my windowsill and see that my two-foot stack of barbri books isn't there any more.

And it goes a little something like this

Thanks so much for all the good vibes and prayers and thoughts and wishes and hopes y'all threw at me. :) I had the essay portion today, which is what I was most worried about, and I think it went pretty well. Though who really knows...after this I've got to do my best to forget about it, cuz I won't get results till the first week of November and essay grading is so subjective who can tell? Tomorrow is the multiple choice portion, so keep thinking happy thoughts for me!

I was seriously feeling sick all last night. Didn't get to sleep till almost 1:30, I was so nervous, and then I had anxiety dreams and woke up every couple hours all night. Woke up at quarter to 7 and that was the end. I got to the convention center by 8:10 and hung around in one of the main areas with my friend Richard, chatting nervously about conventions (to avoid thinking about exams). I should have been tired but I was so nervous that I couldn't stand still. Finally at 8:30 they let us in, and I found my seat: the convention hall was maybe 100 yards+ long, and it was mostly full of hundreds and hundreds of those rectangular folding tables. They sat us two per table, on either side of the long part, facing each other (to prevent cheating while conserving space I suppose). They had a proctor for every 25 people, and they did the usual proctor things. There was a guy with a mike who gave us all the instructions. Most of it the usual song and dance you get with standardized tests, but it dragged on rather. A lot of the nervousness burned off by lunch...I put in my earplugs when he called start and I wasn't aware of anything else in the world except the questions and my answers until he called time.

Have I explained this before? There are 12 questions broken into 2 groups of 6- one morning session and one afternoon. You get 2.5 hours per session, or 25 minutes per question. There are a bunch of different Maryland law topics they test, and they usually appear in various combinations; they give you a long fact pattern and then ask you one or two questions about it. So you have to know the law, and then you have to explain the law and apply it to the facts in the fact pattern. Lunch dragged on too long and by the time we went in again I had started shaking. I finished okay though- was slightly ahead of time in the afternoon actually, so I wasn't having to rush my answers so much. (I got about 5 minutes behind in the morning and had to play catchup on every question.) I walked out feeling really good...probably mostly relief! It was both easier and harder than I expected...I know there are some questions I totally botched, but surprisingly the corporations and commercial law questions I feel really good about...it's the contracts and property that kicked my ass, and the evidence. I'm just glad it's over. Let's all bow our heads and pray that I never, never have to do that again.

FYI, here's the subject matter they tested on this one and the problems, paraphrased by me (we got to take home the questions so it's not like this is a secret):

Question 1: Evidence (Can the payment of a speeding ticket, a criminal plea of guilty, and a criminal plea of nolo contendere be introduced as evidence in a civil trial based on the same incident?)

Question 2: Professional Responsibility, Evidence (When your crazyass client makes plans in front of you to assault her ex-husband, steals your samurai swords to do it, and then asks you to help dispose of them afterward and you decide to get the hell out of the case, are you allowed to tell the judge about all this when he asks you why you want to withdraw? Also, when the crazyass client is criminally prosecuted, can you be forced to testify about the incriminating things she said to a friend while in a meeting with you? Yes, legally these are two different questions. I can explain why if you care.)

Question 3: Professional Responsibility, Torts, Agency (If a reporter comes into a nursing home and harasses an ailing resident about his son's drug use, what can you sue his employer the newspaper for, if anything? Also, if the drug using son tells you dad is starting to lose it, does it affect your representation of the dad and do you have to tell dad what his son said?)

Question 4: Civil Procedure (I'm not going to bore you- civil procedure questions take longer to explain than they are worth. Basically it was about appropriate forms of relief and appeal procedures. But it was easy cuz they gave us the laws, yay!)

Question 5: Criminal Procedure (How exactly does double jeopardy work in this given situation? Also, at a death penalty determination hearing, can the defendant appeal if his lawyer isn't there and he's forced to wear restraints?)

Question 6: Family Law (What disputes will come up on appeal when the court denies a custody request, sets a changeover for 4 years in the future, and throws the dad in jail because he can't immediately pay the 4 years worth of child support and alimony he owes?)

Question 7: Corporations (If two companies are basically operating as one, can the creditor of one take the property of the other to pay the debt? Also, is the guy who owns both companies personally responsible for the debt?)

Question 8: Criminal Law (What defenses does this guy have if an undercover officer persuades him to take a handgun then arrests him for having an illegal gun? Basically it was a question about entrapment.)

Question 9: Negotiable Instruments (A bank stamps a check then refuses to finish cashing it- what can the guy who brought the check in do? We got statutes for this one too, yay!)

Question 10: Criminal Procedure (Find and discuss all the potential search and seizure problems in this longass fact pattern. I actually quite like this kind of question.)

Question 11: Property (Two people own a piece of land and one dies: does the other one own it all, and does a bank that one of them got a loan from have any right to the land? Basically this was about types of joint estates in land...I have no fuckin idea. Property sucks.)

Question 12: Contracts, Agency (An employee working for a developer sells a plot of land by making promises that aren't contained in the contract for the sale. When you sue the hell out of them for reneging on those promises, what are they going to argue in defense and how will the court rule? I didn't do so hot on this one either.)

So! Aren't you glad you're not a law student?

Bar exams suck

I feel like throwing up. 12 hours to go.

I am so very weary

I started my new job Monday and it is way harder to sit down and study after working 8 hours than I thought it would be. Chalk that one up to experience I guess.

The thing that has really thrown me though, is that Sunday I found out a friend I cared about and respected a great deal died over the weekend. It's completely horrible, and as a side benefit is not the sort of thing that's conducive to focused studying. I'm trying to get back into the groove now but it's still hard. Plus, I'm still so intimidated by the stupid exam that I don't want to study because if I don't study I can avoid thinking about it. Stupid, I know.

I met the outgoing law clerk of a judge I used to intern for today. He took the bar last year, and he told me something interesting and oddly encouraging. He said, when you go in to take the test there will be seats empty, from people who do not show up to take it. When you go back after lunch, there will be more seats empty, from people who were so freaked out by the first part of the exam that they gave up and went home. On the second day, there will be even more people missing. Don't be psyched out. Good advice. It's reassuring in that it makes you wonder how many people fail just because they don't finish the test, and in that it makes me feel somewhat superior. I understand that not everyone is totally self-confident, but I can't imagine the mindset where you are so freaked out you just give up. I mean, you've already done the studying and the worrying, just take the stupid thing! Hell, maybe you'll fail, but if you leave early you WILL fail.

Someone should do a psychological study on law students...I swear we're the most neurotic people on Earth.

Poor blog, you must feel unloved

I took the 4th of July off. I haven't had much to report because I'm still having focus problems and the closer we get to crunch time, the more disheartened and frightened I feel. Bar exams suck.

I finished Conlaw this week- and I must say, it's astonishing that Barbri managed to turn a subject I actually find fascinating into a week-long snooze. Seriously, the writer of this outline spent pages lovingly discussing things like ad velorum taxes, which I had never heard of prior to this outline and hope to never hear of again.

Anyway, I am doing biz orgs now- agency, partnership, corporations. In the middle of partnerships, and I couldn't help being amused when I read that creditors are permitted to attach transferable interests of a partner in the partnership (ie distribution of profits). I have this image of a creditor sucking on to the partnership's backside like a leech and sucking out the profits. Hee.