After the bar exam

Its been a long time. I'mmmm Baaaack! Hello Dear Readers, I have truly missed you. Many a day has passed that I planned to check in with an update, but alas, preparing for the bar exam is in a word, BRUTAL!!!!! ... Do you know how to apply the Rule Against Perpetuities? Who is the fertile octogenerian and why should you care? Can you recall what factors give a court personal jurisdiction over an out of state defendant? Can you recite the different standards the Supreme Court uses to analyze restrictions on commercial speech, core political speech, symbolic speech, nonpublic forum speech, public forum speech, public employee speech etc.? If you sign a contract to buy a house, and it is struck by lightning and destroyed before closing, who is on the hook- you or the seller?

Ok, ok- here's an easy one. What are the nine types of marital misconduct that the court will consider in awarding alimony? Does Grandma have a right to demand visitation with your kids? Can you set up a trust for your cat? Can a lawyer lend a client money to buy milk for their starving baby? Can you shoot an intruder who enters your house? If so- what doctrine is your defense and what crime did they commit? If the President signs a treaty and Congress passes a law to overrule it, who wins under the Constitution? What does the Constitution actually say, anyway? Finally, what are the three ways you can be charged with first degree murder in North Carolina?

This is just a very small sample of the information that has been carefully catalogued in my mind over the last three months. [Side note: if any of you have seen the movie, "Limitless" you realize what great potential now rests within the recesses of my brain. If you haven't seen it, you should. Great film.] The bar exam covers 14 subjects over two days in the format of 12 essays and 200 excruciating multiple choice questions. It is truly an endurance test. Even though I've been through this before in another state, it wasn't any easier the second time around.  It has been almost a week, and I'm still coming down from the experience.

I'm sitting in the library as I type this post. The last hoop I must jump through to gain my license is to sit for the the multistate ethics exam this Friday. It is a relatively minor feat compared to the bar exam, but just hard enough that failure to prepare equals failure.

I hope you have all been well.  Thanks so much for letting me ramble- especially if you've made it this far into this post.  It's good to be back.  Excellence is deliberate- Amen to that!