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Today I was asked to accompany a woman I work with in Philadelphia's Project
Dawn Court to Family Court for a support hearing. Upon reflection, it was really quite amazing.
I arrived at Family Court and, upon flashing my attorney ID
card, I was permitted to bypass every metal detector and cut every line. I competently presented my client’s
evidence before the hearing office and we both emerged from the building soon
thereafter, all smiles.
I then walked to
Reading Terminal Market, and picked up
produce from an urban grocer and meat from a Mennonite butcher (which I used to
make
this).
As I walked from the downtown market to the subway, market
goods on one arm and a leather briefcase on the other, I walked by the
Pennsylvania Convention Center and thought to myself, “There is the site of my
victory.” It was in this giant
building that I sweat out a passing Bar Exam grade.
I then examined my clothes- pinstriped suit, rabbit-fur
lined gloves, and a knee-length black down coat. A far cry from the Rainbow sandals and Roxy hoodie of my
suburban Disneyland youth.
It honestly wasn’t until these moments, reflecting on my calm, successful morning, when I realized that I am an East Coast Urbanite. And an attorney. And it’s marvelous.
~~
Like someone who has been kidnapped and tortured by
villains, I therapeutically wrote a small memoir of my Bar Exam experiences several months
ago. You may have read it
already. If you are contemplating
law school, I highly recommend reading it.
Otherwise, don’t spoil the positivity of the post above and save yourself the effort :)
Cathartic Musings On the Bar Exam
Or, Law is Not for the Faint of Heart
Or, DON’T DO IT!
Studying for the Bar Exam is not just the accumulation of 3
miserable years of studying fulltime for hours and hours every single day,
wading through ancient English texts and cases written by long-winded,
self-righteous Supreme Court Justices who over-use difficult vocabulary and
Latin phrases just because they can, and statute after statute after statute of
poorly-worded, grammar-rich garbage.
No, its not just a review of some subjects you’ve already poured over
for hundreds of hours. Its
re-learning hundreds of years worth of laws, case laws, and three-pronged test,
factors to balance, and standards of proof and review not only from the English
common law, but also the majority rule among the various states, and also the
minority rule among the states, and the rule specific to the state who’s bar
you are taking, and perhaps the specific rule for another state if you are a
masochist like me who insists on taking TWO bar exams at once.
And you not only need to know these things well enough for a
multiple choice question or two, but well enough to craft an entire essay on
any given splinter of a topic at the slightest hint that it might be
relevant. In other words, the bar
examiners won’t likely say, “What are the elements of a valid trust?” and allow you just to vomit your
memorized list. No, no. They will give you a convoluted factual
scenario and expect you to draw from those facts that a question of a trust’s
validity may be involved and you will then need to organize an essay discussing
that the issue is whether there is a valid trust, give the elements, apply the
facts to each of those elements, discuss other relevant history/case(s)/
statute(s), and reach a legal conclusion.
[PHEW!]
Oh, and you must be prepared to do that for every subtopic
in every law school course you’ve taken and several courses that you have NOT
taken. In other words, there is
never-ending work to learn and re-learn literally volumes of information in
about 6 weeks time, coming fresh off of final exams. Bleh.
With so much work to do, life becomes…dull. For me, it was a constant fight to keep
my sanity. My prep course was
online and, consequently, I spent hours in front of my computer listening to
painfully dull lectures and hours more reading, and hours more doing practice
questions and writing practice essays and so there were times when I would go
for days on end without saying a word to another human being.
I began regularly singing aloud just to make sure my voice
still worked!
Like my other classmates, I began to look for humor and
small semblances of happiness in my hopelessly hum-drum routine. I think the authors of the practice
questions understood this and so, to make sure we were still paying attention,
they would throw out the oddest questions.
For example:
“A mother gave title to a waterfront bungalow to her twin
daughters for their 3oth birthday.
The deed gave the twins joint ownership with rights of survival. The twins immediately moved into the
small bungalow and founded a religious cult, which met every week at the
beachfront house. Furious, the mother demanded that they return the
property. Equally furious, the
twins ripped up the deed and threw the shreds at their mother. They then vacated the bungalow and
moved to Mexico…”
…
“A clown owned a clown college and the land on which it
stood. The college was located
next to an etiquette school. The
owner of the etiquette school detested the clown college, as she felt that it
undermined her efforts to teach proper manners to software executives. One day, the software executives
skipped etiquette class and sat on the fence separating the properties to watch
the clowns practice. One of the
executives shouted catcalls at one of the new clown students. The student became distracted, tripped,
and fell on the clown college owner.
The clown college owner suffered severe injuries, including minor brain
damage. Since he could no longer
teach clowning, he decided to sell the college and the surrounding
property. The etiquette school
owner saw this as the perfect opportunity to rid herself of the embarrassingly
gauche clown school…”
Oh, my.
Meanwhile, when my fellow students and I managed to find a
moment to commiserate one with another, we all concluded that we were all
suffering unexplainable hair loss, weight fluctuations (for me, this was the
obvious result of self-medicating with mini cheesecakes and carrot cakes from
the local creperie/chocolatier), nightmares about failing the exam, and
hopelessly grouchy.
As the exams approached, the anxiety compounded. My friends all reported to me that they
were all suffering from constant, nagging stomach pains and were finding it increasingly
difficult to sleep. I experienced
these woes too. I began taking
Tums like breath mints and it seemed like just as my head hit the pillow, my
mind decided it needed to drudge through every trauma I had ever
experienced.
Miserable.
And all for this stupid test that I had to pay literally
thousands of dollars just to take!
It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but honestly! About $700 for one state’s exam, about $600 for the other
state, around $150 per state extra just to use my computer to take the exam
rather than handwrite, about $2000 for my review course (and there were much
more expensive courses available!), around $450 for hotel and travel costs to
actually be present for the 3 days of exams far away from my home, and so
forth.
Now, there’s a trick if I’ve ever heard of it! Make you pay hundreds of thousands of
dollars to get a legal education but it doesn’t count worth a dime unless you
pay around $4000 more and endure several months of torture preparing for the
exam and then waiting for an unreasonably long time to find out if you have to
do it all again!
If you haven’t figured this out my now, I will be plain:
don’t go to law school if you can possibly help it. You’ll only wind up in mountains of debt, with shaky mental
health, and –in this economy- most likely jobless.
But in all of this drudgery, there were a few positive
realizations that I made. It never
occurred to me that I had such a wonderful social network. Many people realize what a royal trial
this is and so support came out of the woodwork from friends I hardly knew I
had!
Living in a small community, I have come into close contact
with many of the locals and I was constantly being cheered on and encouraged by
people left and right, including old professors that I ran into in the grocery
store, on the street, etc.; Bikram yoga instructors; yoga class members; my Taiji
instructor & fellow class members; staff at the gym; the local college swim
coach; people at church left and right; and even my landlords!
Even in the darkest and loneliest of days, I was encouraged
by those around me and I could feel the love and prayers of my family. Even better, my mom sent me a card in
the mail every day with inspirational quotes and goodies! So sweet! Sometimes it seemed like they brought me the only smile of
the whole day and I was very grateful to know someone was thinking of me.
Finally, exam week arrived and I actually was excited at the
thought of studying being OVER!
But that excitement wore thin and on the morning of the
third straight day of examinations, I awoke with a weary moan and hammered on
my pillow with my fist, wailing, “Noooo!
I just can’t do it anymore!”
Despite all this, I did do it.
I emerged from bed and turned on the Rocky Theme Song and began shadowboxing in my underwear, knowing that now was the time to leave it all in the ring.
Then came the waiting game. Months of worry until the exams were graded. But such is life, and I only could pray I wouldn’t have to repeat all of the above ever again.
And, the Lord be praised, all signs point to the fact that I will not have to repeat it again. On the day the Bar results were published online, I frantically read down the list of P's and when there it was in all its glory- Price, Lindsey Ruth- I beamed a bigger smile than I ever had before. In fact, I didn't stop smiling for weeks. I can hardly think of a time I prayed with greater gratitude than on that night when the results came through.
There is a God. The End.
