The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

We met at high noon shortly before nine this morning. Me, armed with only my wits and my pencil. It, armed with 200 incredibly annoying and trivial questions, plus the copyright notice from hell. (It's practically worth its own post, this egregious, overreaching copyright notice that prohibits much more than the copyright statute actually entitles copyright holders to prohibit, and does so with the threat of greater penalties than the copyright statute actually provides for, including potential disbarment. Meanwhile merely "breaking the seal" on the question booklet is deemed to be consent to these terms, terms which you (a) can't read in advance, (b) can't note down to take with you for your own reference of what you've agreed to, and (c) can't refuse without sacrificing your entire career, since if you don't agree to them you can't take the test, and if you don't take the test you can't get admitted to practice. Talk about duress, which, ironically, is a subject ripe for testing on the MBE...)

Anyway, as far as the test goes, I suppose it ended up a draw. I felt pretty good after the morning session, finishing 45 minutes early, but dragged in the afternoon. The afternoon seemed to have more property and evidence questions, whose rules I was familiar with but had apparently not perfectly memorized. Also, I was tired. And bored. Still, I think I did better this time than last, mostly because when I was stuck I looked more at the mechanics of the question to try to isolate (read: guess) the correct answer than I did last time. I suspect that might help, but then again, the whole thing is a crapshoot, so who knows.

Now there's just one more day, just like the first day, with three 1-hour California essays in the morning and a 3-hour performance test in the afternoon. I don't know how I feel about how it went the first day. Success is plausible, I suppose, but not guaranteed. I discovered in reviewing my criminal law notes this morning that I'd apparently mushed up a bunch of insanity defense rules, which unfortunately occurred on a question testing insanity rules... And I kind of ran out of time on the performance test, which surprised me. I've never had a timing problem before, but I've never tried to write a single essay non-stop for an hour and a half straight after already having written for three hours earlier that day. The performance tests aren't hard, per se, in terms of needing to know and recall law, but they do require mentally juggling a lot of information and then physically regurgitating it. Allegedly this exercise is designed to reflect what it's like to be a lawyer. If they say so, I suppose...

Whether I'll be able to pull this all out is anyone's guess, but hopefully it's the kind of thing where you're a winner just by showing up. I talked to a fellow bar taker last night, who's been taking it in Oakland (where the lights apparently went off for 15 minutes while they were taking the test yesterday) and she, too, noticed a surprising number of absences, way more than either of us had seen when we took the exam in New York. Of course, as my dad reminded me, I did pass the bar in New York, and, "if I can make it there, I can make it anywhere." As long as the California bar examiners are sufficiently familiar with Sinatra, he may be right...