A couple of my friends just passed the New York bar, which has me thinking about my own bar exam (Maryland, July 2009). Anyone want to share bar stories?
Mine is less a story, as such, than a confession: I genuinely enjoyed the bar exam. Both the prep and the test itself. I’m a sick man, I know. But still. Perhaps it’s because my last year of law school was really hard - I loved it, but it was difficult. My classes were difficult, the job search was stressful, and my legal clinic work veered between long periods of grinding research and short periods of absolute panic. My very last assignment for the clinic, right after graduation, was arguing before an Immigration Judge who’d already rejected every argument we’d briefed, leaving us with little more to do than beg the Court for mercy - which my client did not get. A hard year.
Compared to that, I found bar prep to be quite restful. I moved out of my group house into my own apartment (for free - I was petsitting for the summer), and was able to finally set my own schedule. If I wanted to go to video lectures, I could do that - or I could go to workshops, or watch the videos at home. I could study in a nearby coffeeshop, or blow off studying to go walk in the park nearby - I know bar prep is supposed to be stressful, but I hadn’t been this relaxed in a while. Besides which, I actually learned some new law - I’d only had a glancing exposure to family law in school, for example.
Heading up to Baltimore the day before the exam was probably the closest I’ve ever come to a spiritual experience. As low-key as my bar prep summer had been, it’s impossible not to start to feel the nerves hit as exam day draws near. I was tired and scared when I went to Union Station to board the train. And then I got on, put on my headphones (Zero 7 is perfect train music), and watched the city turn to suburbia, then trees and grass. And the fear … it just left. The switch flipped, and I was fine. Just fine. You probably had to be in my head to really appreciate it - but this was one of the strongest experiences of my life, and I’ll remember it for a long time.
There was a certain black humor to checking into my hotel, and walking around the neighborhood looking for dinner. The whole area was flooded with exam-takers - clutching laptops or notepads, some wearing suits, some just with the pinched look of someone who knows there’s something vitally important they should be doing, but can’t remember what it is. You could wish “good luck” to almost any random passer-by, and get a genuine “good luck” in return - it was an instant pocket community of deeply worried people.
The test itself was surreal - roughly 1,500 wannabe lawyers crammed into a conference hall, with the head proctor’s voice booming out like Yahweh on Quaaludes. People babied their laptops, taking the greatest care to never bring their water-bottles anywhere even remotely close enough to spill. Technical glitches went from irksome to terrifying in seconds - I had a bad scare myself, and spent five minutes convinced I’d have to handwrite my exam. This would certainly have led to failure - my handwriting is horrible, and the graders can’t grade what they can’t read. But I fixed the problem, and the test began.
You can’t judge how you’re doing on the Bar while you take it. It isn’t possible - don’t even try. There were moments on the essay exam when I thought I was brilliant, others where I thought I was an imbecile - I’ll never know when I was right or wrong, because Maryland doesn’t tell people who pass how they did on individual questions. I could look up the sample correct answers from that exam, but I forgot what I’d written within hours of the exam itself. The worst bit wasn’t not knowing things, or even running out of time when one more sentence was all I needed - the worst was having time to spare, sitting back while all around me keyboards clacked, and wondering what the hell I was missing.
That was the first day. I left shaking, exhausted. I’d resolved to spend my evening studying, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. My hands hurt, my head hurt, and by then I was convinced I’d failed. So I went to the waterfront instead, and sat, and read. My hands stopped hurting, and I grabbed a burger. Then I went back to my hotel and slept, waking fitfully with the absolute conviction that I’d overslept.
The second day was the multple-choice test - easier, in a lot of ways. A multiple choice answer can be wrong, but it cannot be incomplete - the nagging fear of yesterday, that I’d written answer that would be right if I could come up with just one more sentence or paragraph, was gone. But multiple-choice brings its own torment to wannabe lawyers - we spend years, after all, training to find and exploit the ambiguity in almost any hypothetical, and argue it at length. Being asked to provide definitive, absolute answers is painful - the instinct to over-think makes every answer look equally right, or wrong, after a while. There’s nothing for it but to force yourself to go with your first instinct, forget your pencil has an eraser (I was tempted to tear mine off, like a much nerdier Cortez burning his ships), and move on.
At the end of the day, I drank. The bar was full of my bar exam comrades - some talking with friends, many silent and focused upon their drinks. That was me. I had a scotch, then another. Ran to catch my train home, had more scotch there. And I didn’t leave my bed for a good twenty hours.
The perverse thing is that part of me enjoyed all of this - the stress, the challenge, the limits. I left shaking, exhausted, and convinced I’d failed - but part of me wanted to go back and do it all again.