First, congratulations to all the people who took the bar exam this week.  Ideally, you found it relatively smooth sailing after a summer spent thrashing about in the water like a wounded seal.  (You can mix your metaphors if they’re all maritime terms, right?)

Congratulations to the people who care about this newest batch of law school graduates — you may now have you loved ones back.  Ideally, this will be welcome news.

Congratulations to the bar review companies, because I’m sure you’re all rolling around on your giant piles of money like Scrooge McDuck after another crop of law students begged you to take their remaining money and watch your DVDs.  Kudos.

And lastly, congratulations to the New York State Board of Bar Examiney Goodness.  Here’s to the continued success of the lawyer’s club, chaps!

Additionally, I have to keep this bracelet on until tomorrow when the test is done. Now I know how all those gazelles on National Geographic feel.

To mark the occasion, I’d like to answer a questions I received on twitter from a Miss Beans:

(1) How much do you regret the bar classes you didn’t take in school?

(2) do you feel comfortable w/what you learned in rev?

Without knowing what the bar exam proper is like, I’ll give this a shot.

[I haven't re-written or edited this, so I must apologize for the sloppiness of what follows.  I'm slightly pressed for time, and I ramble terribly.]

First, I think it’s important to get some context.  In law school, I did not take New York Practice, Wills & Trusts, Family Law, or Criminal Procedure.  These are really the only bar subjects that I didn’t cover on their own or as part of a larger class.  My school mandates (what I assume are) the traditional first year classes:

• Contracts
• Civil Procedure
• Torts
• Criminal Law
• Property

As well as required second-year classes in Constitutional Law and Evidence, I took Corporations (which included agency) and a class on the UCC (sales and negotiable instruments).

That being said, my last semester of law school, I took a class taught by a former instructor of a bar review course, called “New York Law in National Perspectives.”  It covered eight subjects, including Wills & Trusts and Criminal Procedure.  The class was intended to be a survey course of popular bar exam topics, and give students a chance to dip a toe into the whole “bar review” grind before the real deal begins.

So, to answer (1), I don’t really regret not taking certain bar subjects in school.  I think part of that my luck in attending a school with a bar review prep class.  But part of that is because by the time you’re a graduate, you’re good at picking up legal theories quickly.  There’s an internal logic to the law, and while you may not have been quite so bad at sussing it out as I was as a 1L, the fact remains that as a J.D., you pick up on it very quickly.  Specifically:

Wills & Trusts was covered in my bar review prep class: it’s mostly straightforward, but there are some areas where I’ve done some extra work to keep my head above water.  I don’t know that it would have been worth a 14 weeks of my life to get that extra time to spend with the material, to be honest.

Family Law wasn’t covered in my prep class, but I think this is even more straightforward.  Perhaps my ignorance just glosses over the topic, but I think that while there are lots of rules (aren’t there always?) none of them seem to descend into a thicket of legal esotericism the way Freehold Estates do for me.  Seriously, screw Fee Simples Subject to Conditions Subsequent(s?).

And New York Practice is the term at my school for NY’s civil procedure: statute of limitations, pleadings, motions, defenses, jurisdiction, venues, etc.  There’s almost no legal reasoning required here, just memorization of rules and tests.  This is the sort of meta-law for which index cards are sold in bulk.  I think it’s a waste of time to take it before your last semester of law school, when the scarce few complex areas of NY Practice might still be fresh in your mind.

Really, I really don’t think I missed enough of any of these subjects to hurt me on the exam.  And I don’t plan to practice in either of the two substantive areas of law, so the fact that I haven’t spent time in a classroom wrangling the doctrine for myself isn’t inhibitive.  I suppose if you somehow knew you had some strange mental block with regards to Corporations or Wills, you should get as much exposure to it beforehand.  Maybe Evidence, because hearsay may drive you batty if you don’t spend a good month or two on it.  But really, the bar review guys are very good at what they do (and hell, for $3k a head, they’d better be!), and you’re very good at what you do by the time you’ve finished six semesters of law school.

So, with regard to question (2), bar review class is a little too much like first semester’s exam week all over again.  On the one hand, you know you’re all in the same situation, and everyone’s rather nonplussed.  On the other hand, this is of no comfort at all, because you’ve just finished drinking from the fire hydrant.  Trying to soak it all up on your first go is impossible, and you’ll have to spend a lot of time afterwards trying to mop up the bits that bounced off the outside of your head.

Bar review is differently, obviously, in that now it’s not the grasping of legal principles that’s tricky, but the retaining of thousands of legal principles.  In theory, I’m comfortable with any of these laws I’ve learned.  You know, a few at a time.  The novelty here is retaining nearly as much information as you learned in all six semesters combined, and being able to cogently spit it out on command.

I worked hard, I stayed in on weekends, and I kept up with what the class was doing.  I did the homework problems, I’ve reviewed my wrong answers, and I made sure that I wasn’t saving a mountain of work until the end.  There’s just no way to cram for twenty subjects at once: you have to keep up a steady pace all summer.

Even so, immediately after the hydrant (the class) has shut off, I feel bewildered.  I’ve been doing my best to keep up on past subjects while learning new ones, and that’s just damn hard.  If you never studied for two (or three!) exams at once in law school, you should do it at least one semester.  Seriously.  Compartmentalizing that much information all at once is a skill, and I don’t think bar review should be the first time you try it.

Overall, I’m pretty comfortable with what I learned in bar review class.  Not right now, though.  I take comfort in the fact that I have fourteen days to re-read my notes when no one is throwing new notes at me.  I can focus and start to compartmentalize, and I feel pretty good about where I’ll be in fourteen days.  Again, none of this stuff is impossible, and some of it is downright easy after spending all that time in law school, but it’s the combination that’s tricky.

I hope that at some point in my rambling, incoherent response I was even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought, and that everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it.

Once separate property is co-mingled with marital property, then under the Transmutation Theory…

You know, back in my day, we didn’t have Harry Potter jokes.  Wizard humor revolved around Dungeons and Dragons, and that’s the way we liked it.

This question is based upon the case of Kleppe v. New Mexico, 426 U.S. 529 (1976), where the Court upheld the power of Congress to protect wild burros under the federal Property Power.

That’s damn fine coffee you got here in Twin Peaks.

I take some solace in the fact that my second thought (after “holy cow, that guy almost got hit by a car!”) was “the Statute of Limitations on a personal injury like that is only one year, unless the driver was negligent.”  You know, because if it were my first thought, I’d have worried that being a lawyer was dehumanizing my worldview.

For instance, did you know that a lawyer is not permitted to accept payment of his fees in sexual favors?  Actually, you probably did.  That seems pretty self-evident, actually.  I don’t know why my professor bothered to-  oh.  Well then.  Moving on.

So there I was, in a basement exhibition hall in the J. Jonah Jameson, Jr. Convention Center, located in the middle of scenic construction sites on the Hudson River, with more than a thousand almost-lawyers.  I was located next to the bathroom, with about four dozen folks queuing to relieve themselves after pounding what I can only assume is Starbucks’ latest concoction—the sort that’s probably regulated as a controlled stimulant in the EU.  A constant stream (no pun!  no pun!) of students meandered in and out of the bathrooms for the duration of the test, which wouldn’t have been terribly distracted, except half of them chose to wear hard-soled shoes.

<sidebar> And speaking of distractions, there was this almost-lawyer who decided she’d be well-advised to show up wearing daisy dukes, and ended up walking allll the way down the exhibition hall to the bathroom twice in the first hour.  (1) Exactly how many Speedball Macciattos did you have, lady?  (2) You know you can still dress like a fifteen year old who waited until her father went to bed before going out with her friends after the exam about the importance of a lawyer appearing professional, right? </sidebar>

My favorite part of the exam was actually before we even had answer sheets to bubble in our name, address, social security number (really?  In 2010?), favorite food, name of our first pet, and who would win a showdown between a Terminator Model T-1000 and the Incredible Hulk piloting the Exoskeleton from Alien.²  As the JJJJCC was meant for conventions, not exams, there’s a huge honking doorway into the exhibition hall.  The doorway is closed by a massive steel curtain which rolls down from the ceiling, slowly and ominously.  All I could think of was one last almost-lawyer making a mad dash for the door, sliding underneath it at the last moment, and reaching back for his hat.  Alternatively: maybe someone could have pulled an Echo Base.  No such luck; maybe at the Bar.

Anyway, it apparently takes five weeks for the test results to come back, but I look forward to whether a room full of lawyers think I’m ethical or not.  Here’s hoping it’s not a conflict of interest to sue yourself for sexual assault for tax purposes!

1. the head proctor definitely called it the Multiple Professional Responsibility Exam
2. It takes absolutely forever to bubble in the word “exoskeleton”

In what scientists will doubtlessly (and breathlessly) refer to as Dominic’s Icy Precipitate Postulate of ’09, I postulate the following.

The awesomeness of a snow day [UPDATED FOR 2010] is directly proportional to how much you expect it to happen.  For instance, as a wee child, you expect the heavens to issue a salvo of powdery white “Get Out of Doing Homework Free” cards upon command.  I mean, you begged and pleaded for those Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures, and that worked, right?  It has to work for some snow: snow is free!

As you get older, this phenomenon eventually tapers off, as you’ve realized how badly you want something has little to no bearing on whether it happens: at least with regard to snowman DNA.  Eventually, you get to college in Buffalo, only to find out it doesn’t snow there nearly as much as you’d heard.

But here I am in New York City, which apparently gets about two feet of snow per winter.  I’m way more excited than I thought I would be for a snow day, mostly because I was convinced I’d never get another snow day in my life.  Which is what led me to create Dominic’s Icy Precipitate Postulate of ’09.  Observe its elegant simplicity in chart form:

Look upon my works, ye employed, and despair!  I am nerd of nerds!

Seriously though, personal injury attorneys may be about as reviled as lawyers come.  I suppose District Attorneys with political ambitions are probably unpopular among some segments of the population, but it’s much more likely that I just watch(ed) too much TV (before law school).  Put aside your abject outrage for a bit, Dear Reader, and consider what function a personal injury attorney serves.

Think of the circle of life: plant makes fruit, bird eats fruit, larger bird eats bird, snake eats large bird, mammal eats snake, dinosaur devours mammal, shark with jetpack eats dinosaur, jetpack runs out of fuel, shark crashes, worms eat shark’s corpse, and worms nourish soil for plant.¹

In the same way that every creature in the life cycle plays a part in propping up the enterprise as a whole (until the inevitable nuclear holocaust caused by SkyNet), the personal injury attorney plays a key role in our society.  Sure, firms don’t want to run afoul of consumer protection laws, but they’re similarly skittish about running afoul of lawsuits.  Laws make it a Bad Thing to sell some kinds of unsafe products, lawsuits make it an Expensive Thing.

And, of course, the counterargument goes that having an army of lawyers sitting around waiting for your company to get sued is an Expensive Bad Thing in itself.  Worse, it’s one which makes your safe products more expensive, because you have to offset your costs of keeping all those lawyers around.

Like just about everything in the world, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the optimum outcome lies somewhere between “everyone should sue everyone for everything ever” and “no one should sue anyone ever again.”²  But we definitely need more funny commercials:

Frankly, I’m glad there’s a firm injecting some levity into the discussion and reminding folks that not all personal injury attorneys want to sue everyone.  These conversations are so damn heavy all the time.  They’re totally harshing my mellow, maaaan.

1. I was a sickly child and absent for most of my 4th grade biology class.  I’m pretty sure this is how it goes.
2. This is the boldest claim anyone in the history of the tort reform debate has ever made.

Just think of the Wikipedia articles in fifty years: the List of Jetpack Prison Escapes is waiting for us, in the future.