September 5, 2006
More bar exam-related ridiculousness ::
legal — tagged bar exam, bar study, legal, personal and rant
8:22 am
I noticed that James started posting more regularly again. How nice! One post that particularly caught my eye was this one, on the stupidity of bar review courses. He notes specifically the lawsuit that the National Conference of Bar Examiners brought against PMBR, the self-appointed “leader” in Multistate Bar Exam (MBE) test preparation, which PMBR lost. In the opinion, the federal judge presiding over the case noted that PMBR lifted a test question directly from the MBE but actually got the answer wrong.
I remember when I was debating on whether to take the PMBR course, one of the sales representatives noted that lawsuit as a selling point for the program. The inference I was supposed to draw was that PMBR’s questions were so good that NBCE was actually scared of the program, and thus brought a (frivolous?) lawsuit to protect themselves. The disingenous way in which the rep tried to present this suggestion immediately turned me off to the possibility of taking the exam. In the back of my mind since then I’ve found I’ve had a little regret for not taking the exam or, more generally, not taking every opportunity to prepare myself for the bar exam. But after hearing this story, I don’t feel so bad at all.
Which I guess goes to show that some opportunties are best left unexplored.
September 2, 2006
Bar exam results coming soon ::
legal — tagged bar exam, bar study, legal, personal and rant
9:01 am
With September here and the Vermont Bar Exam results most likely being released in just a few weeks, I’ve been thinking more lately about that test (and of course more specifically, whether I passed it). With that, I thought this WSJ essay, written back in July and linked at the 2006 Bar Exam Blog is becoming relevant—and to certain degree kind of funny—once again:
Even putting aside the hours of enjoyment you can have packing your test-day clear plastic storage bag, preparing for the bar exam isn’t a heck of a lot of fun. Most people say the worst part is doing hundreds and hundreds of practice multiple choice questions, but I think the worst part is how doing those multiple choice questions makes you feel about the world. Nothing good ever happens to the people in practice bar exam questions. Everyone who crosses the street gets hit by a car, every doctor botches the surgery, parachutes never open, contracts never get fulfilled, anyone who uses a lawnmower ends up in the hospital, as soon as you write a will your whole family dies, employee benefit plans never pay out their benefits, computers all get viruses, your friends are always intoxicated, stealing your farm equipment, and driving it into the barn, police search you all the time for no good reason, you can never find a good place to hide your weapons, banks never recognize a signature as a forgery, and the forger always flees the country.
June 15, 2006
Morlocks, Eloi, and the impotently angry: a day of bar review ::
personal — tagged bar study and weird
9:18 pm
I’m pretty sure it’s because I’ve stepped up my bar review efforts in the past few days, but I’ve become increasingly intrigued by the long, sometimes convoluted narratives the bar examiners develop for the test. On two separate occasions, lecturers have suggested that the examiners are on illegal drugs when they write these questions; one lecturer suggested they were on LSD, while today’s lecturer insisted it was cocaine. No matter the drug, the end results are sometimes interesting, sometimes downright nutty.
Here’s a particularly good example. One question involved a woman who owned two dogs that barked constantly while she was away at work all day. In a not-too-veiled reference to the Time Machine, the woman’s next door neighbor, Morlock (yeah, that’s right), worked at nights and slept during the day. The dogs’ incessant barking drove him to madness, during which he “came to her front door with a tape recorder and an electrically amplified bullhorn. He started playing a tape of the dogs barking putting it at full volume and amplifying it with the bullhorn” [emphasis added]. This of course causes the woman (whose first name is Wanda and whose last name just has to be Eloi) to freak out, slamming the door in Morlock’s face. And of course, this being a torts question, “[t]he door struck the bullhorn and jammed it against Morlock’s face, knocking out two of his teeth.” Youch.
At times the examiners approach something approaching humor. For example, while describing an altercation between two boaters, one examiner wrote about the first boater “rais[ing] his middle finger in the timeworn salute of the impotently angry and shout[ing] a few well-chosen references to [the other boater’s] anatomy and ancestry.” Of course, I just want to know what, exactly, such a “well chosen reference” might be, that can taking into account both anatomy and ancestry.
More generally, I think all this suggests I should get out more.
June 13, 2006
I am not a leper ::
weird, personal — tagged bar study and weird
2:37 pm
I had no idea that, in the world of defamation, a plaintiff had an automatic right to damages if the she is able to show the defendant (inaccurately) asserted to a third party that the plaintiff suffered from a legally recognized “loathsome disease.” Here, by loathsome disease, I mean a disease that would cause people to generally think less of the plaintiff. What’s particularly weird about this is that there are two such recognized diseases: one is “venereal disease” and the other? You guessed it: leprosy.
I write this just to let you know that I am not a leper. [Update: oh, and you shouldn’t infer that I have a venereal disease, either. Because I don’t.]
May 24, 2006
Yes, they really make you study that ::
personal — tagged bar study, the simpsons and weird
3:59 pm
One of the weird aspects of bar review is the obsessive coverage of areas of law that have absolutely nothing to do with the actual practice of law in the real world. One such area, which we covered today, was the area of common law crimes. (For the uninitiated, these are crimes that were created by the courts rather than by statute. Why is this obscure? Because in every state in this country, all crimes are defined by statute.) Why do the bar review people do this? According to the man on the video tape, it’s because each state has its own peculiar version of the criminal statutes, so you can’t really have a multi-state review of, say, the law of murder, by studying some particular murder statute. If you’re thinking about how absurd this is, I am with you.
In any event, I just spent two and a half hours reviewing common law crimes, and the only thing that kept going through my head is that episode of The Simpsons in which Bart calls 911, is placed into an unworkably complex automated voice mail service, and, in an act of utter frustration mashes the key pad. The response? “You have selected regicide. If you know the name of the king or queen being murdered, press one.”
I’m not sure what I’m going to do if the rest of my summer is going to be like this. All of the classes may be boring, but at least I’ll be entertained in my mind.
