I spent all day Saturday at BarBri, having Professor Chemerinsky tell me everything I needed to know about constitutional law for the bar. It was pretty much exactly the same lecture as last summer, down to each corny joke, down to each minute, practically. But that's kind of impressive.
I asked him how many of these lectures he does, and the answer was astronomically high. Particularly last summer, when I think he did 17! And he rattled off a whole bunch of cities all over the country. But he says he's cutting back, and next year may only do NY and CA. Which is too bad for people elsewhere because the lectures are really quite good. Or at least relatively painless (relatively - they still take hours to get through).
Yet that still means he'll be doing 6 lectures: one in NY, and five in California. Why so many in CA? Tradition, he said. In my mind this is very inefficient, and greedy of California BarBri, since now it deprives other states' of his lectures. But he thought it was too bad that NY didn't have more live lectures. Me, I'm not so sure. I've done a lot of taped lectures, and now a live one. And while live is better, it's not so much better as to be particularly deteminative. More important is the quality of the lecture. And yes, it is important to humanize this very arduous experience, but that can be satisfied, as it was by NY BarBri last summer, by sending in staff attorneys to help reach out a helping hand, nearly literally. I don't think CA BarBri has been quite as good on this, quite frankly, but I doubt the solution is to hog more of the good lecturers like Chemerinsky.
Written 1/9, posted 1/12.