Adam Engelhart

Bar Exam: Day One

Today is the first day of the California Bar Exam! I’m sorry I haven’t had time to post more, but preparing for the bar exam has left me so busy that I haven’t had much time to blog about it. However, I did want to share with you this sign that somebody posted in the elevator here:

There are worse send-offs than that, I suppose. Here we go!

1 comment July 29th, 2008

Lolfinancier

So I’ve been seeing a little of Carl Icahn in the news recently with this whole Yahoo! business recently, and I’ve been in a bit of a weird mood due to the bar exam, and it led to me coming up with this:

powered by icanhascheezburger

I don’t know whether cheezburgers constitute a significant portion of Mr. Icahn’s portfolio, but I suppose if they don’t I could plead comedic necessity.

There, that counts as studying corporations, right?

Add comment July 21st, 2008

Admission and the Bar Exam

I apologize for the lack of bar exam posts–even though I wrote a lot of these before my bar review course started, I haven’t really had time to post them. If you read through this, you should understand why. Anyway, where were we? Ah, yes, talking about . . .

Admission to the Bar

Ok! You have spent three years at the law and, against all odds, have graduated from an accredited law school with your sanity mostly intact. Mazel tov.

But while you are a lawyer (one who is learned in the law), you are not yet an attorney (one who may represent another in legal matters). To become such you must be admitted to the bar of the jurisdiction in which you intend to practice. You’ve gone a long way towards this already, but there are a few more hoops remaining.

All jurisdictions in the United States require that you prove that you have the appropriate moral character to become an attorney. In California, proving this requires that you fill out a remarkably long form (846 kB PDF) with details of your criminal, credit, education, and employment histories, and that your fingerprints be taken for a background check.

Having done that, the real fun begins with

The Bar Exam

which is a comprehensive test of the basic areas of law that every lawyer should know. This is slightly different in every jurisdiction. In California, we take:

• The California Essay Exam, six essay problems much like most law-school exams
• The California Performance Test, two tasks that come with a statement of the facts, a library of documents to use in analyzing it, and a question asking you to draft some sort of document based on your analysis
• The Multistate Bar Exam, two hundred multiple-choice questions (as the name implies, this exam is given in many US jurisdictions–there are multistate essay and performance tests, but California doesn’t use them)

Each of these three parts is divided into two halves (one performance test problem, three essays, or 100 MBE questions), each of which takes three hours. The exam is given over three days, which is another way California is special–it’s usually just two. We do three essays Tuesday and Thursday mornings, one performance test on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and a hundred MBE questions during each session on Wednesday.

To put this into perspective, the average law-school final exam (which determines the student’s entire grade for the course) takes about three hours, except for courses with take-home finals and those graded on a final paper or project. In a typical term, most students will take between three and five of these during a period of a little more than two weeks.

Furthermore, Hastings has a provision in its regulations called the “48-hour rule,” whereby if a student has two examinations that start within 48 hours of each other, the records office will postpone the latter of the two to preserve that spacing.

The California Bar Examination is the equivalent of taking six finals in three days. It begins fifteen days from today.

So you can see why I might be under a little bit of stress at this point.

1 comment July 14th, 2008

Butter

Did I mention that I made butter with my family a while ago? It was fun, and pretty easy–I recommend doing it. You can see the photoset on Flickr. Apparently, someone chose one of the photos to illustrate the Wikipedia article about butter.

Add comment July 1st, 2008

There are duty attorneys for times like this!

So I posted about Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney a while ago, and I recently found the game on Verizon’s hideously maimed walled-garden of a software site. I decided it’d be worth the $5 or whatever, and you know, it’s pretty fun! It’s definitely a true adventure game–there’s only one way to get through it, which makes the gameplay more like an interactive novella than a role-playing game–but it’s fun for what it is. The replay value is next to zero, though.

However, I’m actually writing about a website I came across earlier today, specifically that of the Japan Federation of Bar Associations. You may wonder what to do if you are arrested in Japan, but never fear! There are duty attorneys for times like this!

In truth, the protections that suspects get in Japan are markedly less than the ones in the States (for example, you can be held without charges for 23 days), and people are far less likely to take advantage of them. However, the fact that the organization that offers the duty-attorney service has a cute manga informing prospective clients of the service is just adorable to my Western eyes.

Anyway, this also goes towards explaining how the Phoenix Wright justice system could seem plausible. From the States, it seems ludicrously Draconian to have, for example, trials limited to three days or the insane burden-of-proof provisions you see in the game, but I think it looks slightly more reasonable in Japan. That said, it’s just a game, and I should really just relax.

Add comment July 1st, 2008