Adam Engelhart

Bar Exam: Intro

June 6th, 2008

Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn’t explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.

–Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

The work presumes a standard of education corresponding to a university matriculation examination, and, despite the shortness of the book, a fair amount of patience and force of will on the part of the reader.

–Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory

In recent years, a lot of newly-minted JDs have blogged the process of preparing for the bar exam. I intend to follow through on this trend, blogging not only about the process of preparation but about the law I’m reviewing at the time.

As you are (and I am) about to find out, preparing for and taking the bar exam is a very serious undertaking. You might want to know why I’m bothering to write up these blog entries while I’m doing it. The reason is that I really enjoy explaining things, and that I thought that explaining the law I’m reviewing to a general audience (educated, intelligent people without any legal training) would be an excellent way for me to review what I’m doing and fix it in my mind as I prepare for the test. I also hope that these entries will be useful to other people, whether they are prospective examinees, law students, or curious civilians. In particular, I hope that you will find them useful, or at least interesting, or at the very least an efficient way to avoid productive work for a few hours.

At first, I’m going to blog about background topics that my bar review course won’t cover specifically, but that are important to understanding what’s going on. In my law school experience, I found that this was one of the harder things to pick up, as they weren’t explicitly taught, but left for students to discover on their own.

Later, I’ll blog about the particular substantitve topics we’re reviewing at the time, as well as my experiences while studying for the bar.

Entry Filed under: Bar Exam, Law