Sixty-Five-Year-Old-Man Takes Bar Exam
To be honest, it’s more like “Hello, old task.” Having completed the MPRE a week ago, the following day I started my bar review course. Most graduating law students begin bar review a week or two after leaving law school. This gives them about 8 weeks of intense study before taking the bar exam at the end of July. Since I still work as a library director, I am starting earlier so that I can spread the course over about 17 weeks. There are still several hours of assignments to be completed each day, including on weekends.
The old friend is contracts law, the first subject I covered in the review course this week. When I attended law school at the University of Florida many years ago, the university operated on the quarter system. My two quarters of Contracts were the fall and winter quarters of my 1L year – so in this case “many” means more than 44 years ago. My “introduction” to the study of contracts law was a year before that, when I saw Professor Kingsfield ask a bewildered Mr. Hart to explain the holding in Carlill v. Carbolic Smokeball Company, an early scene in The Paper Chase. While I knew already that I was not destined to attend Harvard, I was already applying to law schools and I identified with James T. Hart in some ways.
In my contracts class we did not cover Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code, termed “Sales,” which governs the sale of goods in the modern age. There was a separate class for Sales, and I did not take it. During my practice I only occasionally had need to deal with Article 2. So, when I went through the notes and online lectures in this week’s contracts review, I remembered many of the elements of contracts law and most of the common law rules but the provisions of the UCC were relatively new to me. By the end of the week I was taking practice Multistate Bar Exam questions on the subject, and not doing too badly, meaning I was at least meeting the performance levels the course sets for early study.
Read outlines, watch lectures, create mind maps, take practice tests. This will be a major part of my life for the next four months. Along with planning to move, implementing retirement from UC (effective at the end of August) and making time for the gym and a little entertainment. And you thought getting on Jeopardy! was tough!