YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU: Say you've got a very large pile of money and want to make sure that your worthless children don't get any of it. Also, your worthless grandchildren. And, also, everyone you might have ever met in your entire life. You write your will like lumber baron Wellington R. Burt, who made sure that no one got any of his money until twenty-one years after his last grandchild (then living at the time he wrote his will) was dead and buried.
Some of the press is calling this "bizarre." It is nothing of the sort. Mr. Burt could push his estate no further into the future than now due to a important little bit of law -- the Rule Against Perpetuities -- which prevents someone from keeping control over their estate long after death. Mortmain -- the dead hand -- isn't something the law favors. And Mr Burt's lawyers knew -- as every student studying for their first year property exam or bar exam knows -- that "No interest is good unless it must vest, if at all, not later than 21 years after some life in being at the creation of the interest."
What this means is that none of his leeches spawned from his loin got at his $100M until 92 years after he died. And a dozen or so people who never met the cheap bastard are now set for life.
I think it's bizarre simply because we never see it in action except in property hypos.
ReplyDeleteRelatedly, if anyone in the Throwing Things community has bar exam study tips, I'm all ears. (NY and NJ to be specific.)
My bar exam study tip is don't sweat it too hard until after July 4th. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying do nothing. Study, go to the BAR/BRI lectures or do the Themis videos online or whatever it is you crazy kids do these days for bar prep, but don't kick it up to the gear marked INSANE until 7/5. You, your psyche, your social acquaintances, and your significant other will benefit from your pacing yourself.
ReplyDeleteI wish I had an old relative like that.
ReplyDeleteAs for bar exam tips- I say:
-go to class
-exercise
-eat right
-get sleep
While I did all of the above during my bar summer, I also had the following within eight weeks: a breakup, food poisoning, a car accident, 2.5 week jury duty, a family death and a trip to the ER. And I passed...because I did the above.
Good luck!
Guest was me.
ReplyDeleteSee, I'm the opposite of my learned former colleague: I ran hard until mid-July or so, at which point my brain was full and I knew that I had remembered well more than enough to pass the thing. I spent the last ten days really easing up, just doing multiple choice questions each day and light review of the state law stuff.
ReplyDeleteTo me, the key of the Bar is just gaining that (deserved) confidence that you've learned enough to pass the damn thing, and realizing (if you've taken Bar/Bri) that there are ways to learn how to take the test, and structure your essays (and predict what will be on them) that'll put you well ahead of the hundreds of people at your test site who didn't take any prep course.
Also, I love this blog post.
My bar exam tip: Take Massachusetts instead of New York so you can go at moderate speed the whole time and still pass!
ReplyDeleteYMMV, as Adam's experience makes clear - a lot depends on what kind of a studier you are.
ReplyDeleteI should also note that the best thing that may have happened to be that bar review summer was that about two weeks before the test, my apartment AC unit died, and my incompetent landlord couldn't/wouldn't do anything about it. The brutal Philly summer heat forced me to stay in air conditioned libraries for those two weeks, studying as long as they stayed open.
Also: make sure you have at least one alternate plan for getting to the test site. I remember riding in a car with three other friends on our way to the test at the Valley Forge Convention Center, and traffic started getting bogged down on the Schuylkill Expressway -- we were stuck, it was pre-GPS, there was no map in the car, and we were all getting pretty nervous. Fortunately, we'd given ourselves more than enough cushion on time, but ... have a plan B, is all I'm sayin'.
You didn't get out of jury duty for studying for the bar? You weren't thrown out of the pool?
ReplyDeleteMy plan? Booked a room at the Motel 6 by the King of Prussia Mall for the exam. Not only didn't have to worry about the commute, but had a convenient place to go for dinner and to clear my mind the night before each day's test.
ReplyDeleteMr. Cosmo and I are "panic after July 4" people. Adam B's technique is not something you can choose to adopt. You're either that person or you're not. If you're looking for tips now, you're not that person. Go to barbri religiously until you get your crappy score right around 7/4, then panic and run hard the rest of the way. Then go see a mindless movie the night before the exam.
ReplyDeleteUnsurprisingly, I concur fully with the Missus. I also think there's a solid logic reason for the Adam C. approach: for 3 years, you have been learning and studying in a certain way for a certain type of test. The bar exam is not that kind of test. I found the first month of bar review extremely useful for modifying my approach and expectations for the exam -- in other words, I revamped my learning "skeleton" during that time, and then really hung all of the knowledge on the newly-formed bones during July. This is not AT ALL to say blow off studying until then -- go to every class and do the homework. But when you start doing extra studying in July, and start revisiting the topics you covered earlier, you'll be astonished at how much easier the knowledge flows now that your brain has been re-wired for bar exam purposes.
ReplyDeleteI can't speak to Bar/Bri, because I used Micromash with flash cards and passed both NY and CA. If you feel like you can be self-motivated, you don't have to use B/B. Not without a lot of stress, because I'm sure B/B gives you anecdata that's hard to gain otherwise. (OTOH, at the CA exam the B/B students had inexplicably not studied for Cal Civ Pro changes that had occurred two years earlier and had not yet been tested; they were told it would not be on the exam.)
ReplyDeleteI could have done more practice questions for the MBE. Those are ALL trick questions that take practice to avoid traps.
My horror story is having an undiagnosed infection that caused massive pain I thought was simply due to studying. I was so out of it by the third morning in CA I spent about an hour staring into space and could barely write anything down for two of the three essays. Went straight to the ER right after the exam. I didn't think I would, but I passed.
I am not sure this is the best advice. First, unless you are not planning to practice or practicing in DC, you probably can't just become a member of whatever bar seems easiest to gain admission. Second, if you just wanted the easiest way to become a member of a bar, there would be easier advice to follow. Why not just attend law school at U-Wisconsin and apply to the Wisconsin bar which does not require graduates of Wisconsin law school to take the bar exam? Also, it is a bit of a myth that the Massachusetts bar exam is easier to pass than the New York exam. New York's overall passage rate for first-time takers is low because approximately a quarter of the first time takers are educated outside of the United States. In July 2008, the passage rate for this group was 54.8%, whereas candidates from ABA sccredited schools taking that exam for the first time passed the New York bar at a rate greater than 90%. http://www.nybarexam.org/press/1108%20press%20release.pdf
ReplyDeleteHuh My inlaws just had a contract accepted for a place by King Of Prussia (yep, spending Thanksgiving in Pennsylvania, something I never thought I would say).
ReplyDeleteMy sweater vest and pocket watch wearing property professor had a very painful "R.A.P. rap" that he performed in class every year. I wish I could remember some of it for your amusement!
ReplyDeleteThanks all for the comments! I am definitely a steady-as-you-go kind of person, and I went to almost every single class in law school itself (missing only for Jewish holidays and a trip to SCOTUS.) Your stories are just reinforcing what I already know: I know myself and the way I study best. I'm doing Barbri and they have a very regimented schedule, and I intend to stick to it as much as possible.
ReplyDeleteI live a $6 cab ride away from the Javits Center, so I'm not worried about getting there. I'm more worried about my computer spontaneously combusting and having to hand-write my essays (it's been a while since AP Langauge & Composition.)
Back when I found out that the last Harry Potter movie was coming out a week before the bar exam, I realized that I wouldn't be able to wait to see it. So that's likely to be my pre-bar movie!
My advice is to keep everything in perspective. You have to go to class for a few weeks, study for a few weeks and then take a test and not finish in the bottom 10%. I suspect you have been doing that your whole life. The test will not be the hardest thing you have ever done and, as seen above, people pass it even when facing any number of distractions and obstacles. If you take a prep course and do what they tell you to do, you will be just fine. Also, when doing practice exams, don't panic at low early scores. As noted above, things really start to click in July and you will be surprised at how fast your scores climb as you get closer to the test date.
ReplyDeleteAll good bar review advice. I'd just add that you shouldn't bother studying the substantive law. Just keep doing practice questions until they become second nature and you'll learn the law that matters along the way. (Disclaimer: this was very effective for the WA bar, which has a pretty consistent style of questions. It's possible it won't work elsewher.)
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of Harry Potter, the last book came out the Saturday before I took the exam. I got my wife to hide our copy until after the exam was done. A couple people were reading it during the breaks and in the evenings.
My three tips:
ReplyDelete1. If you got into a good law school, you're likely pretty good at taking standardized tests. Even though the MBE is more knowledge-based than the SAT/LSAT are, the same basic tricks (process of elimination, recognizing buzzwords) still work. Use them.
2. Listen to the BARBRI/PMBR people. They know what they're talking about, and the vast vast majority of what's on the exam is going to be covered in their lectures, with even more of it being covered in the books they give you. (There are exceptions, as pointed out above, but they've got a pretty darn good idea.)
3. Somewhere on your Bar Exam, there will be a question that you will have no idea about. If you're lucky,
it's just a multiple choice one, but it may be (like it was when I took it) an entire essay. One of the five NY essays the year I took it was on a wills issue that was covered nowhere in BarBri. A lot of folks freaked and froze. I realized that I had 3/4 of IRAC, but just didn't know the rule. I picked a rule and ran with it. No idea whether I was right or wrong on what the rule was, but those that froze got lost and were much more likely to fail.
Agreed to Matt's Point 3. We were told each of our essays would have a primary substantive focus. My second essay question was a straight 50/50 of crim and evidence. Completely freaked me out - I knew both areas of law like the back of my hand but the structure *was not how they said it would be*. I was very close to leaving in that moment because I thought it was a harbinger of all to come. Sometimes you just gotta take a deep breath and go for it. Worse comes to worst, flag the issue and throw down the closest rule you can think of.
ReplyDeleteAgreed. It's a marathon not a sprint. Also, treat it like a job. I did a 9am bar review class, took an hour for lunch, then studied until six. Then I was done for the day.
ReplyDeleteAs a non-lawyer, I have no bar exam tips. But as a theater person, I wanted to say: Break a leg, Saray!
ReplyDeleteCompletely agree. I always get funny looks when I say that I had the time of my life studying for the bar. A half-day of class that I was taking pass-fail, no homework, sunny weather, and bars on every corner? There is no amount of misery a person suffers during the first phase of bar prep that should not be blamed totally on the person taking the bar.
ReplyDeleteDuring a break in the MBE, I heard everyone grousing about a question on water law. My last class in law school was a public resource class (including water) and it was the one non-obvious MBE question that I knew I knew.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Sue!
ReplyDeletedouble espressio on game day. it's a good way to get the caffeine without filling your bladder.
ReplyDeleteNope - I tried to get out, but both sides wanted me. It was a complicated case and they were trying to get the "smartest" jury they could find. 14 jurors in DC Superior- all 14 had bachelor's degrees, 12 had masters and probably half had more than that. In addition, the judge's clerk was in the BARBRI evening class and she told the judge that if she could work all day and then go to BARBRI at night, I could, too. And the judge told me to not study crim or crim pro while I was on the jury. It was a fascinating experience- and I'm happy I did it - but I was not happy with that judge or that clerk!!
ReplyDeleteI should also mention that water dripped on me DURING the bar exam and I still passed. (they moved my seat....eventually).
ReplyDeleteMy main thought on bar exam prep is a lot like what my main advice is on studying for law school, but with a caveat. The advice is: do what you need to do to avoid feeling *too* stressed. I studied steadily, so I never had the July-panic cram thing going. That's very much me personality, though, and I'm sure plenty of people felt better going into the exam having crammed a ton for the 2-3 weeks before. (That also ended up working for me, because I caught a bad cold in early July.)
ReplyDeleteThe caveat: As someone I knew said to me---if I found out I got a perfect score on the bar, I'd mostly jut think that I'd spent too much time studying. You want to pass, but no need to kill yourself trying to get perfection, as there is no gold star. So, however you study, give yourself some time to relax.
My bar exam story: so, I took the bar while clerking in Chicago and living in Printer's Row. The two mornings of the bar, I got up, walked down the stairs, got a big hot tea from Starbucks, then walked the 1.5 miles to Loyola. That was all good, and really made me feel alert and all that good stuff. That said, during the bar, they wouldn't let us keep drinks at our tables, which killed my usual tactic for dealing with a bad cold---constant fluids. So, by the end of day 1, my cough was back with a vengeance. Badly enough that the bar proctors actually looked into putting me in a separate room. The second day was the multiple-state. I felt rotten, so I basically whipped through it, without really stressing about questions that I didn't know. Then, I'd put my head down and try not to cough. But still, passed, got into the Illinois bar, waived into two other bars, so....
No homework? Are you kidding? There's tons of homework.
ReplyDeleteI hope you all pass the bar. I will now express my disappointment that none of this discussion was about the old asshole lumber baron.
ReplyDeleteThe second paragraph of this is exactly what I told people behind me in grad school who were spending hundreds (literally, hundreds) of hours studying for their prelims: You're trying to PASS the damned thing, not ace it. My advice was generally met with scorn; it's really hard to get people out of the mindset that they need to show mastery of the subject, and that mastery = 90% or better on the test.
ReplyDeleteTreating it like a job (with this exact schedule) is pretty much exactly what I did. Which is weird, because we have the same name. --Kate from Michigan who hasn't posted in a very long time.
ReplyDelete