Today was the exam for the International Commercial Transactions exam. OK, so I may have gone to the first class for the silliest of all reasons, but I stayed in it because I was curious. And even though I'm still of the view that commercial transactions are inherently boring (there's nothing about either of those two words, either separately or combined, that gets my blood pumping), I still got a lot out of the class and was glad for the taste of ICT that I was able to fairly painlessly get. I never would have given over the units of my American law school schedule for something I was so dispassionate about, but here it didn't involve much of a trade-off to be able to try it out. And I did find the material interesting, if not for its real-world applicability, but because process always interests me and that's what this course, like my conflict of laws one, was really about (the process of how to unwind these international contractual disputes).
So lord knows how this exam will be graded... but I left feeling pretty good about it. We had to apply the Vienna Convention for the International Sale of Goods to a fact pattern, and I think I did a pretty good job walking through the issue. Much better than I usually write my exams, in fact. More systematically than the usual mental muddle I'm able to produce. I think I may have been onto something when I suggested that the conversation with my friend on IRAC structure might have helped me... Hearing him articulate how he walked through his exams gave me a tangible model to follow.
But that was today. Last week had its own end-of-semester crush. I had to do my final oral argument for my moot court class, I had to do my final for Cour Jouridique, and I had my final exam (along with all the other international students) for German Law. That one was tough, but not in a way an American exam would be tough. It was hard because it covered a lot of different topics, taught by different professors, and to different degrees of depth. We learned eight subjects (general administration of German law, Tort Law, Criminal Law, Constitutional Law, Company Law, Competition Law, Administrative Law, and Contract Law) and had to answer questions on 6 of them. I ended up skipping Criminal Law and Administrative Law, I think, because when I looked at them I blanked out. What's odd is that I guess I answered Company Law, Competition Law, and Contract Law, and I'd missed classes those days... But because classes here are lecture-style – or at least that's the style of the German profs, since these were all Bucerius professors – many of them often have scripts of their lectures that you can read. So I took notes from the scripts a few days before the exam and therefore had something to say. Still, I don't know how well I did: I didn't feel as good leaving that test as I did today, and I'm sure my performance varied from subject to subject (I obviously knew more about some than others). It was hard to study for, because unlike an even longer American law class, the material from one day didn't really relate to that of another. There weren't really any efficiencies we could harness in studying, and instead had to try to know ALL of it and hope for the best on the test.
But it's done, and now it's just one more class meeting of Constitutional Law tomorrow, then two exams next week and an essay for ADR, then the semester is over. Kind of sad, actually... I'd just gotten the hang of it...