I have finally emerged from the Bar exam vortex to find that spring has well and truly sprung here in the Village. The transition has felt too quick - the last time I marvelled at the charm of the Village it was the weekend before the exam, and there was a luscious snowfall that lasted only one day. I heart New York.
Early morning snow in late February on West 10th Street
It’s been one month and twenty days since the bar and I’m still a little tender, the aftermath was almost more traumatic than the preparation. You must excuse me if occasionally I adopt a melodramatic tone, or tend toward hyperbole.
Like many of my fellow exam takers, I am preparing for the worst. Only 40% of candidates pass the February Bar (the pass rate drops to the low 30s for foreign law school graduates). Of a group of eight Australians who sat it last year, only four passed, and two of those four were sitting it for the second time. As if these odds weren’t bad enough, each day you learn of another genius, some university medallist or Rhodes scholar, who failed.
The experience wasn’t all doom and gloom. The bar had its hidden delights. Who would have thought I’d find five good things to say about the New York Bar Exam?
1. You get to visit Times Square every day.
Two months out from the exam you start your basic crash course in American law, which takes place in a building at the very epicentre of the most deranged intersection in Manhattan - Times Square. Every day you skip out of work at 5:15pm for your 6pm class, head to the Wall St subway station conveniently located under the building, and squeeze onto a packed uptown train. Your destination is West 42nd Street station - one of the city’s busiest commuter hubs - where you arrive precisely in the middle of rush hour to join swarms of people heading every which way to catch their connecting trains. You emerge from the subway to the visual assault of 20-storey high flashing billboards, neon lights, massive TV screens, endless cars, trucks, and people. So many people. Times Square in rush hour is New York turned up to maximum volume. It inspires a frantic state not all that conducive to study. You wonder if it is somehow part of the test. Perhaps they are teaching you that to succeed in New York you must embrace the city’s extremes, not retreat from them. Whatever the reason, Times Square is a sympathetic background to the chaotic ride towards the bar exam.
2. You learn a thing or two.
Like the fact that fear can be a great motivator. Panic sets in once you begin to process the scope of the task. At this point, your desire to avoid the deep shame of failure is overtaken by the great fear that you might have to go through the whole sordid ordeal all over again, and in the summertime <shudder>. It was not our inquiring minds or our thirst for knowledge that spurred us on; it was fear that drove us. Not that we were bad students - but our nightly classes were less than inspirational. They involved watching a videotaped lecture (often recorded 6 months ago) for three to four hours, while we followed along with fill-in-the-blanks style handouts, writing down words when we were told like mindless drones. We did not discuss cases, nor engage in lively debate, nor was there any background or context given to the material. Just rules, lots and lots of rules, and exceptions to the rules. And exceptions to the exceptions.
We are not talking about getting the hang of a few high-level legal concepts either. We are expected to memorise all the painful little details: all the elements for the each of the 6 species of criminal homicide at common law; the 5 different tests to determine an insanity defence; the 7 requirements for valid execution of a will; the 22 exceptions to the hearsay rule; the percentage of the shareholder vote that is required to approve a corporate merger; the 8 situations where police can conduct a search and seizure without first obtaining a warrant. You must memorise all of these things, and hundreds more just like them, all at once, because you may be tested on any or all of it, all at once. As a fellow candidate put it, “it’s an act of professional bastardry of the worst kind”.
(Using American-style study aids like whiteboards and flashcards was new and exciting to me)
3. You may not be as tough as you thought you were, but you survived.
With that much pressure, people are destined to crack. I, like many other independent people, have come to fear the idea of the “the breakdown”. But while I was awash in a sea of adrenaline for the first morning, which can’t have been helpful for my reading comprehension skills, I was better off than the person sitting somewhere behind me who collapsed on day two of the test, just hit the floor, boom. I noticed the paramedics zooming down the aisle on a little indoor vehicle and quickly turned away, calculating I had no time for voyeurism. I’m told another test taker in the same vicinity suddenly stood up and started sobbing at one point. There was also a guy doing push ups, but I digress.
There are all sorts of urban bar exam myths in circulation. This one is my favourite:
In one bar exam administration, one test taker collapsed to the ground clutching his chest. A neighboring test taker, who happened to be a physician, immediately darted to the collapsed test taker, and began administering a heart massage and CPR. The exam administrators went and called 911, which brought out the emergency personnel to take the man to the hospital. It was agreed that the physician test taker had saved the man’s life, and that without his efforts, the man would have surely died before the emergency personnel arrived. Nonetheless, when the physician asked to have extra time to finish his essays, he was refused, and ended up flunking. It took many months, and embarrassing news stories, before the state bar allowed the man to pass. Unbelievably, students are now advised to offer no help to anyone who is taking the exam, even if they happen to be dying.
(From PejmanPundit’s Blog, one of several to provide bar exam advice)
The point of all this is that the bar exam can induce heart attacks and meltdowns, and although I admit to having some pretty big freak outs, I’m still standing. And when I managed finally to get some natural sleep when it was all over, and when that sleep brought with it some pretty vivid anxiety dreams, I thought to myself “if this is the worst thing my damaged nerves can throw at me, then I’ll be alright.”
4. It’s refreshing to have a short term goal again.
I don’t know about you, but short term goals have become rarer the older I get. On one level, little projects help the lazy side of me stay motivated and engaged, but the absence of the short term goal has a much more serious side effect - you can end up doing a terrible lot of thinking about about the future. No good can come of this. The bar exam gave me respite from introspection and my ongoing quest to figure out the meaning of my life. For a couple of months I had a clear purpose, one so demanding I couldn’t spare a thought for myself. It was a nice distraction, although one I admit I’m not keen to repeat.
5. When you’re done, you reconnect with the simple things.
After spending a couple of months in small rooms with big books and great worry, forgetting to eat and how to fall asleep, when you’re all done and you regain the freedoms in your life, it is intoxicating. You take pleasure from the simplest things, like going for a guilt-free walk on a weekend afternoon, without having to mentally revise your notes at the same time. Enjoying as many cocktails as you like. Sleeping in. Sleeping. It’s lovely and unexpected when an experience shows you how to appreciate the things you take for granted.
Let’s just say there are critical moments in a persons life, experiences that leave you irretrievably altered: that first taste of independence; the blissful intensity of first love and the ensuing heartbreak. Sitting the New York Bar is one such moment.
And if I fail, I guess I’ll just do it all over again in July. I’m confident of one thing: that I too am unlikely to need as many attempts as this Californian gentlemen.
Ms. Sullivan is unlikely to need as many attempts as Maxcy Dean Filer, who may hold the California bar endurance record, having passed in 1991 after 47 unsuccessful tries. The Compton, Calif., man, who says he’ll practice any kind of law that “comes through the door — except probate and bankruptcy,” says he always tried to psych himself up before taking the test by repeating, “I didn’t fail the bar, the bar failed me.” WSJ
I was glued to the election coverage anyway, listening to commentators, watching the debates, getting up to speed on which states were red and which were blue, and following the maths on the electoral votes. Somehow all the detail became as compelling as the idea itself. Thoroughly seduced by the spectacle, and whipped into a personal frenzy by the undeniable sexiness of it all, a couple of days before the election I hit rock bottom. An Obama T-shirt you can explain, but nothing screams propaganda victim like my buying this Obama doll - “An action figure we can believe in”. Oh, the shame.
