Our BarBri lecturer today was from Brooklyn, and it showed. But at least she has personality, especially since her subject matter is so awful. It's property law. For non-legal readers, you must be wondering what's so bad about that. After all, you can do interesting thing with property, like build houses, parking lots, amusement parks, etc.
The problem is that property law isn't about building interesting things - it's about sorting out the Byzantine language imparted to us by William the Bastard when he conquered England. Now, granted much of our law in general comes from England. But we've had a lot of time to mush it into our own much more convenient, practical, and straightforward form. Not so property law. Property law bears all the hallmarks of the kind of law you'd get from a country that thought base 12 was a good system to use for its money. In other words, it's a cryptic mess.
Fortunately it is somewhat familiar for most of us, since property is a typical first year law course. However, it's only the American JD students who will have taken it. The interesting thing about New York is that it's one of the few (maybe the only?) jurisdictions that lets foreign law students sit for its bar after doing a one year LLM program (usually in "American law") at an American law school. My BarBri course is therefore full of students like that: there's a cluster of French students, several Japanese, today I sat next to a girl from Israel…
For them, much of the material we'll learn this summer will be new. Plus most of them have to contend with the language barrier to some extent. Even for those whose English is quite good, they are still being overwhelmed with lots of arcane and esoteric vocabulary (yesterday I counseled a Japanese friend not to get too worked up about words like "interpleader," assuring him that most Americans don't know it either), and can't quite scribble English as rapidly as the occasion may warrant. I have noticed, however, that most of them have different notes than the rest of us. While the American JDs usually take full notes or fill in the blanks of our handouts, many of the foreign students seem to have complete versions of the lecture notes at their disposal and follow-up along with the lecture by reading it.
Meanwhile, today's lecture did give some credence to the "alive and dead" instruction of yesterday. Basically, because there can be huge effects on who owns property depending on who is alive or dead at certain pivotal times, it will be hugely important on the exam not to skip over that detail. Still, I stand by my earlier assertion that this advice could have been imparted in a much more… useful form.