Brazen: Passing the Md Bar

Incidentally

2006-11-13T15:11:00.000-05:00

I scored high enough on the MBE to waive into DC if I wanted to. I don't want to, and I don't have the money, and I didn't take the standardized ethics exam anyway, but it's nice to know my score is high enough. (As my boss put it, I could waive into DC if I had $600 I had no better use for; yes, it's that expensive. Yikes.)

Victory is mine!

2006-11-03T16:57:00.000-05:00

*stares at screen*
*checks seat number*
*repeat*

That numbing, shaking, tingly feeling that has come over my stomach and all my limbs?

That is the sweet, sweet feeling of VICTORY, my friends.

I still can't believe it. I keep looking and looking and looking. I'm printing out the list so I can look some more. I mean, HOLY SHIT.

I am going to throw up

2006-11-01T16:48:00.000-05:00

They're posting the results in exactly two days.

From the ABA eJournal

2006-09-01T11:52:00.000-04:00

It's nice to know that the people coaching bar applicants are such moral pillars of the community.

FYI

2006-08-28T10:00:00.000-04:00

I added 3 backdated posts prior to this one, in case you're interested. These were in fact written at the times given, on the days I took the bar exam, I just was too indifferent to put them over here, honestly. Now I'm just waiting.

It is finished.

2006-07-26T16:47:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-25T18:27:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-24T20:09:00.000-04:00

I feel like throwing up. 12 hours to go.

I am so very weary

2006-07-19T21:13:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-07T12:39:00.000-04:00

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.

I am feeling more sane today

2006-06-23T11:36:00.000-04:00

I'm in a generally better state of mind today, and I forced myself to get up at a reasonable hour and start studying. Which is excellent. I have to keep reminding myself to take it one day at a time, and focus on the simple goals: get up, get at least half the studying done before work, do some practice, do some substantive. Set daily and hourly goals and stick to them, that is the key to success.

Also I scored 19/34 (55%) on practice MBEs today, which makes me feel better. Quite possibly yesterday was a fluke. Although according to my performance, I need to go back and study contracts harder. I gave myself 4 days for professional responsibility, but I really don't need that long, I got through the material very fast. So now I have extra time for practice.

Once again, with feeling

2006-06-22T22:40:00.000-04:00

I was going to post this on my private journal, but really- what's the point of having a bar exam blog if I'm going to sanitize it for fear some mythical audience that isn't even paying attention anyway is going to think less of me?

So. The bar exam is only about 4 weeks away now, and my study habits keep getting more and more lax. I can't focus on my work for more than 20 minutes at a time, I can't motivate myself to do practice questions, and I keep looking at my stuff and thinking, "It's no use, I'm never going to remember any of this." I'm desperately frustrated and scared and at the moment, depressed.

The whole bar exam is just ludicrously stupid to begin with. I'm on the hook for more than $60k worth of loans, I spent 3 years taking classes and writing and researching and yes, dammit, even practicing a bit. Am I going to come out of the chute as a fantastic lawyer? Of course not, no one does. But I fail to see how the experience of freaking out about the bar exam for 12 weeks is going to make me a better lawyer, or how an arbitrary test is going to accurately measure my capacity to practice. I can see a little bit of wisdom in the essay portion, although I still question the value of timed essay-writing as a measurement of legal skill. At least you're sort of measuring something: presumably the test-taker's ability to read a fact pattern and quickly pick out the legal issues and have some kind of clue what to do. (Also the ability to write, which is a skill that should be tested, IMO.)

Still in all, it's a relatively silly exercise, considering that the primary basis for our future legal opinions is going to be research into the law, not some vague principles we kind of remember from law school. If there is one thing I've learned from law school, it is that if you don't check the law, physically go and look at it, you are a moron.

And then there's the MBE. Yes, I'm sure the ability to read a half page of text and snap off an opinion on an obscure aspect of common law will be tremendously useful in my future career. I imagine that clients walk into your office, slam down a multiple choice question, and shriek, "Quick! You only have 1.8 minutes to render a legal opinion on this!" on a daily basis. My favorite questions are the ones where the answer makes no sense whatsoever- ie, you actually have to have insufficient knowledge to pick the answer they deem is "right." (I know you bar-takers know what I mean.) My second favorite type is where the subject of the question is some obscure branch of law that no one gives a damn about anyway, and if they did they would look it up.

Because even though the test is all about rote memorization of factoids, you can't just, you know, ask a question. That would make too much sense. You have to make it a goddamn logic puzzle, the goal if which is not to test your ability to select the right answer but trick you into selecting the wrong answer. The MBE is less important than the essay, but unless you're an essay god (and I don't have that much self-confidence) you need to get a decent score on the multiple choice, and when I get freaking six out of seventeen right I start to get a little agitated. Die MBE, die.

Anyway. I can't be the only person feeling this insane right now, can I? I hope not. I know I need to shake it off and keep studying and doing questions, but we come back to the same problem of difficulty concentrating. Vicious, evil circle. Can I just wake up in January and have this all be over with?

ARGH (The frustration is palpable)

2006-06-22T22:28:00.000-04:00

I scored 6/17 on mixed subject practice MBE questions today. Were the questions exceptionally hard, or am I exceptionally stupid, or have I forgotten whatever I managed to learn over the past 5 weeks? I am unbelievably frustrated and disheartened, and it's getting harder every day to force myself to sit down, focus, and study. It seems odd that it's harder as I get closer to the exam and more worried about it...but this kind of intensive study is extremely unnatural to me and I'm losing my grip.

I've also had "Hips Don't Lie" stuck in my head for approximately 17 million consecutive hours, which really is not helping in the slightest.

I value succinctness

2006-06-21T20:04:00.000-04:00

Speaking to a non-law student friend a few minutes ago, I summarized the MRPC in this way: "Basically it boils down to 'don't be a jackass,' but because we're lawyers we need more specifics."

I think that's as adequate a summary as any.

Also, I just finished listening to John Grisham's "King of Torts" on tape, and my prevailing thought is that 2L evidence students could be made to read it and decide exactly how many ethics rules the protagonist violated. If I wasn't so busy, I might do it just for fun.

Ugh

2006-06-18T11:30:00.000-04:00

I've moved on from the sunny pastures of criminal procedure and now I'm in evidence. I've had a good grounding in it, but it's still tedious as anything. I should do a couple essays today along with the MBEs...It stuns me how close I am getting to the exam, and now that I've found a job I have more time to spend fretting about the exam. I don't expect the real freakout to occur until a coupla weeks beforehand, however.

Linkity

2006-06-16T10:53:00.000-04:00

Found this amusing post about bar prep by Jeremey Blachman. Check out his old blog, which is extremely entertaining. His new blog is here.

Now back to criminal procedure...

Checking in

2006-06-11T13:57:00.000-04:00

I haven't been posting here as much as I thought I would. Really, it seems like the struggle to study is just the same complaints over and over again: I'm tired from working, stressed from searching for a job, the material is copious and sometimes hard to get through, the temptation to avoid studying and in particular to avoid essay questions is hard to overcome...etc. etc.

I finished property this past week, and started on criminal law. Property was, if you'll pardon the expression, a bitch and a half. I think I'll probably have to revisit it...I didn't do as much practice as I intended, and I just felt so overwhelmed by the material that it made it even harder to focus. Criminal is much simpler and I remember more of it, so it's somewhat easier. I've done some MBE today; the plan is that later on I'll review my outline again and do a bunch of essays. Then I'll start on criminal procedure, either this evening or tomorrow. (More likely tomorrow.)

I seem to be consistently scoring 9-11 out of 17 on the MBE practice questions, which is around 50-65%. So I'm satisfied with that. It's harder to quantify my performance on the essays though. Not to mention the fact that it's soooo tempting to just...not do essays. Which is a bad, bad idea considering how important essay performance is to my overall score on the bar. I need to practice and I can't leave it all for the couple weeks leading up to the bar.

The main problem with this independent-study thing is that, while it's fairly easy to stay motivated and on task for the first couple weeks, it's a long-haul project and it's hard to stay motivated on an endurance studying campaign. Even when you religiously stick to your study plan, your immediate reward is: you get to do it again the next day. Only the thought of the bar looming closer by the day provides me with any focus at all.

Now I'm starting to wonder when I'm going to get my seat assignment. I got my petition in on time, they confirmed receipt over the phone, and they cashed my check. So...I wait. Story of my life this summer. ;)

Covenants? Title? Bzuh?

2006-06-04T19:53:00.000-04:00

I've take to skimping a bit on my evening studying this past week, and while I feel guilty and have resolved to do better, I frankly blame real property. I don't recall learning half of this stuff; whether that's because it was poorly taught or because I stopped paying attention at some point during the semester I could not tell you. But in any case, it's 110 pages worth of outline in this book that I'm plowing through, which should give you some idea of why I feel so daunted. Just the scope of what I need to know, the range of different topics included under the "real property" headed, and the incomprehensible weirdness of so much of it make it hell to try to retain.

After a certain amount of study it stops making any sense at all; I've found that I need breaks that are rather longer than I've taken with torts or property, just to be able to get through it. I had myself scheduled to focus on property through Tuesday (originally it was Sunday, but I had some breathing room so I bumped it back to give contracts and property an extra day apiece), but I may give it till Wednesday, depending on how things go. Today was supposed to be a review day, but all I did this week was property anyway and I'm trying to finish going through this outline bit by bit- studying the outline and making my own notes/outline helps me fix the material in my mind. Then I review my own (much-shortened) outline.

I need to pick up the pace on the MBE and essay practice too...it's easy to slack on the essay practice and I absolutely cannot do that. For the rest of my property review, I plan to focus heavily on practice and see what I am actually retaining and what I'm not.

It's just devlish hard not to panic over property, is all. I'll feel infinitely better once I move on to crim, which is something I am at least interested in and feel that I understand.

The word "defeasible" should not be allowed to exist

2006-05-31T19:38:00.000-04:00

I hate property law so very, very much. I think I even hate it more than secured transactions, which at least sort-of make sense after you understand how to read the statutes. I want to travel back in time and whack English judges with this BarBri book.

That is all.

Rinse and repeat

2006-05-22T20:15:00.000-04:00

I feel like I've settled into the studying every day thing. Astonishingly, while it is hard for me to sit down and study, it's not the fight I thought it would be every day. I've mentioned before that I am NOT a big studier. I'm not good at it; I can't focus for long stretches of time; I don't know what to do with myself; and worst of all I tend to put it all off till the last possible minute. There were tests in law school that I didn't start studying for until less than 24 hours before hand. Many tests.

I'm aware that I can't pull that kind of nonsense with the Bar, it's too hard and too important, and I don't have that same confidence about it that I did with the law school finals. Perhaps that's what keeps me slogging away. The hardest thing for me right now is the fact that I know I have 10 more weeks of this ahead. I'll finish up a study session and pat myself on the back for getting through it, and then I remember that I have to do it all again tomorrow. It kind of sucks the spirit out of you, so I try not to think about it.

Today is my last day of torts: torts took less time than contracts, and I'm going to put in an essay today, which I am unaccountably nervous about. I guess I feel that it's more of a test of my review and memory than the MBE questions, and I'm nervous about possibly proving to myself that I can't remember a darn thing. One thing I forgot to account for in my reckoning is the relative amount of material in the subjects; for example, I budgeted the same number of days for contracts and torts, forgetting that contracts took 6 credits worth of classes to teach, and torts took 4. Duh! With that in mind, and remembering how hard civ pro was, I think I'm going to alter my schedule to extend the time for that. (Civ pro review starts tomorrow!)

I've been scoring between 9 and 11 right out of 17 on my daily MBE practice; 11 today on a set of "advanced drills" today. Which makes me happy, but I'll count on it more once I start doing mixed-subject drills. I just feel that for now, till I get more review under my belt, it's more beneficial to use the MBE both as practice and evaluation on the subjects I've already reviewed. What I should start doing is mixing problems from the subjects I've already done...Although that still leaves little mystery. The thing I'm worried that I'm not seeing is the actual difficulty and the time eaten up by having to determine what subject a question is in, and shifting gears quickly from one to another. But there's time to get there.

For now, I'm going to go do this torts essay. Wish me luck.

I am so exhausted

2006-05-16T19:02:00.000-04:00

I seriously underestimated how hard it would be to come home from a full day of work and sit down to study. (At least I've now been proven right in my belief that I wouldn't have been able to hack it as an evening student.) I'm doing it, but it is hard.

Almost through with contracts and sales review- tonight should be the last night. Tomorrow: torts! I tried doing the MBE questions first for a couple of nights, but I've switched back because it really just seems to bring more closure to the session. Especially since I find that after a long period of fairly open-ended study, something as focused as answering MBE questions and analyzing the results helps me stay on task at the tail end of the study session, when I've started to get bored and distracted.

I'm going to have to hit some essays this weekend, as I haven't had a chance to tackle any yet.

I'd forgotten...

2006-05-11T19:50:00.000-04:00

How much I really loathe studying. Real studying, where you sit down with your books and work, not the kind I usually do where you spend half the time on AIM bitching about how much you hate studying. Ugh. I went home early and spent the evening on contract formation, specifically offer, acceptance, and consideration. That's like 4/5 of Contracts I right there, isn't it? Anyway, the studying part went okay. The MBEs were extremely depressing though.

I stuck to just contracts problems, and still only got 7/17 right. (41% for those who are bad at math.) Not so great. It's day 1 so I'm not too upset, it's just kind of disheartening to do the MBEs after all this studying and then think, "Arggghhhh I'm so stupid I'll never remember all this! I'm going to fail!" I think I'll move the MBE Hour up to the start. What's probably most disturbing is that I ran out of time with 4 questions unanswered. Not cool. I made a note of the spot and did the last 4 questions anyway, just to see if I could, but I need to learn to pick up the pace. More practice required, is all I can think.

Tomorrow: contract defenses and rights of third parties. Also possibly damages, depending how far I get. I will probably use the extra time I have allotted for contracts (I think it was 5 or 6 days) on sales. (My contracts professor taught us both at once, but I am very rusty.)

And so it begins.

2006-05-11T14:50:00.000-04:00

Job update: still looking. But my current job (the one I lose at the end of the month) is letting me work more hours for the rest of the month, which is nice. Another few hundred bucks never hurts.

I picked up my gown and my graduation tickets yesterday; May 21st is the big day. I'd be more excited if the job search and the bar weren't hanging over my head, but I'm still looking forward to it.

Still, my last final exam of law school is behind me, my bar application is signed, notarized, attached to a hefty check, and mailed, and you know what that means: time to study for the bar! Hooray! Yesterday, I spent some time going through the 2005 Barbri material I have and finalizing my study plan, but today I plan to put in a good 3 hours plus of studying.

My plan is to study 6 days a week, with a 7th as a free day. The 6th day will be a review of the review, so to speak- going over the week's material again and doing practice essays. The other 5 days will consist of about 3-4 hours of study (including breaks), including substantive law and practice MBE questions. I've broken down the subjects that will be tested and allotted 4-6 days per (depending on how well I remember the testable material and how much I'll have to learn or relearn in the subject). Running that through the end of July, then I'll take a week to do a blitz review of everything and practice, practice, practice. Finally, I have some cushion space so I can afford to add another day for subjects if I think I need to (I might need more time than I budgeted for civil procedure, for example). Then final review, and a completely study-free de-stressing day before the bar exam itself.

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the amount of material (and I often do) but I have a plan and I think this will be doable...I just have to have the discipline to follow the schedule. So in about an hour I head home. After a shower and a bite to eat, my plan is:
10 minutes meditation and planning
1 hour substantive contracts study
5 minute break
1 hour substantive contracts study
5 minute break
1 hour for 17 contracts MBE questions, including time to go over the answers and review the principles I didn't remember

Wish me luck...

They're watching, man...

2006-04-12T10:15:00.000-04:00

Long time since I posted. I have, in the past two months, attended the final two sessions of Writing for the Bar: session 3, in which we did another essay problem, and session 4, in which I learned that MBE questions are really hard. It's not that I'm surprised by this knowledge, it's just that there's a difference between intellectually knowing the MBE is hard and trying practice problems of which you only get 3 out of 10 right. (Our calmly smiling instructor assured us that we only need to get 60% of the questions right to do well, and that if we are scoring that at this point we are geniuses of some kind. Reminds me of the European grading systems, where students who are scored on everything by adding points from zero rather than taking away from 100 would no doubt laugh hysterically if they heard we stressed this much over bar exam grading.)

But my central preoccupation of late has been finding a job. I always had a plan of where I wanted to go and how...it just turns out that reality did not sign on to my plan. Additionally, my current job will end at the close of May, so as I don't relish starving to death I need to find some job of some kind, hopefully a law-related one that pays decently. It's really only come home to me recently that I have no idea what I'm doing. I wonder how you're supposed to learn these things: where to look for jobs, how to pick what to apply for, how to apply. I have a general sense of the procedure but still an overwhelming feeling of incompetence. I've never hunted for a serious job before; I came to law school straight out of undergrad, and there's not a whole lot of finesse involved in seeking summer employment at CVS. This is clearly an entirely different game.

I wonder how many of my classmates feel this desperate and lost; how many of them also feel stressed and depressed and ashamed that they are drifting Without Employment thus far. I wouldn't know, because it seems to be a taboo subject. You can ask what bar review someone decided on but nobody asks about jobs. If you see someone in a suit you might say, "Looking good," and ask what the occasion is. But they will tersely reply, "I have an interview" and there will be no mention of the employer and you will not ask; the word "job" isn't even used. I'm not sure if we're just all too stressed out to want to talk about it (there are days when I know if anyone asked me if I found a job yet I would burst into tears), or we're all paranoid about perhaps tipping off the person who is going to steal this job opportunity away. I can't really blame people for not wanting to tell me where they're applying, because I feel the same way.

3 years of cheerful cooperation are gone and we are suddenly all panthers slipping through the trees, too hurried and paranoid to stop to mark our territory, but so starved for meat we're prepared to kill others of our kind for it, then stand growling over the carcass to frighten others away. Grr. My job! Welcome to the workforce!

So yeah, that's about all I'm going to say publicly about the job hunt. It sucks and I have nothing yet and I'm still looking.

Writing for the Bar, Day 2

2006-02-11T11:27:00.000-05:00

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

2006-02-10T23:38:00.000-05:00

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

2006-02-03T21:37:00.000-05:00

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.

Writing for the Bar, Day 1

2006-01-21T12:05:00.000-05:00

Today was the first day of "Writing for the Bar," a one-credit course UBalt is offering this semester. It's careful to warn that it should not be taken instead of bar prep but in addition to it; which makes sense, because it only meets 4 times over the course of the semester. But we'll be talking about strategy, doing some practice questions, and reviewing them, so it should prove a bit helpful. Some of the strategy stuff today was already helpful, although some of it raised questions.

Of course the instructor advised us to take bar review. This is what I mean about everyone taking it as a given. We were also told that we should study 600 hours over the 10 weeks leading up to the exam (60 hours per week, aka 10 hours/Mon-Sat for those who are bad with math) and that we should take off work or avoid getting a job if we hadn't lined one up by graduation so that we'd have more time to study.

Thoughts:
1. Is it possible that 25% of the bar takers flunk because they've gone completely fucking insane from studying 10 hours a day?
2. Is this 600 hours a realistic expectation, or is it more bullshit, like the number of hours they tell you you're supposed to be studying per credit hour taken? (I can't find the exact figure, but it ends up being ridiculous, so full time students are supposed to be studying 40 hours a week or something in addition to taking classes and working.)
3. What planet do you live on where you can just not work for 10 weeks?

Maybe I'd find it easier to believe these kinds of things if the school didn't have a history of spewing nonsense at me. The hours of study per credit hour nonsense is one example. Another (that makes me take their suggestion that I not work as so much rubbish) is that first year, I was told by financial aid that I should avoid taking out loans as much as possible and that I should not work my first year. I clearly remember thinking, Where do these people think tuition money comes from?? The SKY? When you give advice that silly, don't expect me to take you seriously when you tell me I should study 10 hours a day for 10 weeks while foregoing employment. Perhaps the greatest measure of the law student's neurosis is that they manage to bring people to the point where the idea of taking out a loan so they can study 10 hours a day makes sense to them. I have not reached that point.

I see myself individually, as none of these recommendations do, and I always have done what I thought was right for me. I was sure I could have gotten on law review because my writing skills are excellent, but I finished half my case note and consciously decided not to complete it. I chose not to do moot court or to kiss the ass of particular professors who might have been able to help me find work. I did take a clinic, do a judicial internship, and start making connections at the place I know I want to work. I was perhaps the least frenzied first year and my attitude toward studying has always been fairly loose. As far as how successful I am, I'm at about the 25th percentile of my class, with a good GPA. Could I be doing better if I worked harder? Maybe. But I'm pretty much exactly where I want to be.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is the best course of action for everybody (although I think everyone needs to be able to relax, especially first years- seriously guys, you won't die if you go to a party once in a while). But I think deciding how to tackle law school and the bar exam should be something you do based on what you know about your own abilities and proclivities- NOT based on an artificial sense of panic or competition.

Now I have to go back to digging up my old outlines. I still have them on my computer, but I have handwritten notes on some of them...hope I saved 'em all. I also have a tentative study schedule for myself that needs to be fine-tuned, and I have to start looking at the barbri stuff and deciding how to work that into my study plans. I'm working under the assumption that I'm going to have a full time job this summer, so I'm planning my schedule based on that knowledge and on what I know I am capable of. (I'm not one of those machines that can sit and study for hour after hour without a break. I go numb in the head.) I'm thinking 3 hours of study on the weekdays, and 8 per day on the weekends. The ubiquitous "they" say you should do 2000 practice MBE questions, and that I will buy (the keys to good multiple choice test taking are strategy and practice, as everyone should know from the SAT and LSAT), so I'm planning on 25 questions per day on the weekdays and 50 per day on the weekends.

So, out of those 3 hours, 2 for substantive law and one for MBE taking and strategy. Or I can shake it up and throw an essay or two in there. I'm thinking 4 days per subject for substantive law (weekday-wise), which will leave me the last week of the period to do a blitz, reviewing 2-3 subject outlines a day. The weekends, since I have more time, I can spend both re-reviewing the material I looked at during the week and working on essay strategy and practice essays.

I feel like I'm off to a good start. If I can get the schedule more specific, know what materials I have available and how to use them, and follow the schedule rigidly, I will be well on my way to efficient studying.

Marching into the semester

2006-01-14T20:53:00.000-05:00

I probably should have started in September if I wanted to document the full experience, because that's how long I've been working on my application. (In Maryland, you need to file a mile-long application at some point after you enter law school, and then an "original petition" a few months before the exam. The former is mostly character and fitness evaluation, and the latter is primarily to affirm that you graduated from law school.) But really, you didn't miss much because most of the posts would have consisted of me bitching. Suffice it to say, the application was a pain in the butt, but I mailed it off in the last week of December. Wahoo.

Two days ago, again thinking ahead, I started casting about online looking for study materials. By some bizarre trick of fate, I located a complete set of 2005 Maryland Barbri books on ebay. After much furious bidding, I nailed them for $275. (And in the process, reminded myself of why I hate ebaying.) I have read (and I don't know if this is true) that technically you are licensing the books from Barbri when you purchase them and are not supposed to sell them. The first sale doctrine under US copyright law would seem to make this bs (although it's clever bs), and besides, when you cut a deal to illegally divide the market and preserve your monopoly you lose your right to any sort of moral high ground.

Wha-huh?

2006-01-14T20:39:00.000-05:00

Third-years are asked The Question approximately every thirty seconds, especially now when we're in spring semester. Getting down to the wire.

"So, which bar review did you sign up for?"

"Barbri," many will answer. Or, "Barbri and PMBR." Or "Shemer" (a popular all-in-one course run by one of the adjunct professors here at Baltimore). But me, I reply, "I decided not to sign up for a bar review."

They have a tendency to look at you as if you just admitted to fellating a sheep. Sometimes they do a comical, cartoon-esque double-take. And whether they tell you it's probably possible or fight to convince you that you should seek psychiatric help, you can tell from their faces that they're not entirely comfortable with this idea.

It's hard to decide whether to do bar review, because frankly very little data is available. Naturally all the bar review companies think you should do it, they're paid to think that. And so many students take bar review that it's hard to honestly evaluate how much it actually helps. Plus, there's the fact that everyone learns differently and everyone tests differently...a bar review that helps one person might be a waste of time for someone else.

In the end, I decided that I wasn't about to take out another loan just to fall asleep in some company's lectures. I test well, I learn best from reading and self-study (as opposed to lecture), and something in me deeply rebels at falling prey to these scam artists just because I'm scared it might make the difference between passing and failing. Because I don't believe that...that's just the fear talking.

This blog is here because one, I thought it would help me blow off steam, especially as we get closer to exam time, and two, there doesn't seem to be much out there about people who choose not to take bar review. Perhaps my experiences can serve as a signpost for others who want to strike out alone. Or perhaps they will serve as a tragic cautionary tale. Either way, you win!