And So It Begins

Our Law School sponsors a supplemental bar review course taught during the Spring Semester. It covers a few major areas that appear on bar exams in every state on Saturdays, and during the week we have practice tests that are graded and returned. The Saturday sessions are prerecorded videotaped lectures. Here, for your reading enjoyment, are the "extra" notes that I took during the first Saturday session.

Why is she pretending to look around the room, when she’s actually taping herself for playback? There’s “temporary suspension of disbelief”, and then there’s just plain silly.

“It’s in no way a replacement for the bar review program over the summer”... so don’t think you can get away with not sending your check for $2000 to my company. And if you don’t, you won’t pass the bar. I swear.

The criminal law lecturer is enormously fat and has to gasp for air every five or six words. He’s also chewing on something—which I really hope is gum and not his cheek or his tongue—and it’s grossing me out. In fact, it’s almost a blessing that the visual part of the presentation keeps going out, though you would think that they could get a new copy of the presentation, either a new videotape or even an upgrade to a DVD. He sounds like he’s gargling his own phlegm when he talks.

You could have a great drinking game with this video: every time he calls us “folks”, take a drink! Every time he raises his hand, take a drink! Every time he says “What are we going to do?”, take a drink! Every time he repeats the same exact sentence three or more times in a row, take a drink! You’d be drunk before you got to mens rea.

I am impressed with just how much of this I am remembering from first year. We had such a great professor for crim law. Sigh... I still felt smart back then.

I hate the way he says review. “REE view”, like “PO-leese” instead of “poLICE”. I also hate it when he says “yew” instead of “you”.

Enrollment in the Dick Wolfe School of Law: I learned the concept of transferred intent from an episode of Law and Order in which Sam Watterson proclaimed “Intent follows the bullet, every first year law student knows that!”. Other concepts that were clarified for me by Law and Order include excited utterance, plain view, and what qualifies as being in custody. Law and Order Criminal Intent was nicknamed I could practically pass the bar exam by watching TNT and USA on a regular basis!

I cannot believe how slowly this is going. I want to kill myself. Or him. Maybe both.

“Something in the lecture made you sleepy...” something?!

“Does everyone on the tape understand?”... if the answer is no, how would he be able to tell??

“It’s only homicide if the victim is human!” PETA be damned! (Excerpt from my favorite law school hypothetical EVER: “Al Gore in a dogsuit is crossing the street. Arnold Schwarzenegger runs him over when he runs a red while driving an ambulance without turning on the lights or sirens. Al Gore dies from the injuries sustained in the accident. Is Arnold Schwarzenegger criminally liable? What, exactly, should he be charged with”)

Oh. God. No. I just realized that we’ll have to watch this exact same tape this summer!

“If you thought that a revolver with one chamber loaded is not a deadly weapon, you will never own your own home.” What on EARTH do those two things have to do with each other? Seriously! I mean, I understand that he’s saying you’re really stupid if you don’t get the first concept, but there are a lot of really stupid people who own their own homes. I met a lot of them when I worked for the disaster recovery company. I bet MadDog met even more of them working for the insurance company.

“The slightest penetration completes the crime of rape”... Oh, god, that was simply too graphic coming from his mouth...

You know, the most useful part of this is discovering that apparently I did learn something in law school after all (Who knew!), not so much the substantive material he’s covering.

“You don’t have any fear of lack of knowledge on the bar exam” AS IF. I am terrified of lack of knowledge on the bar exam. I mean, we’re talking waking up in a sweat in the middle of the night afraid that I’ll get there and find out that everything I’ve spent close to $100,000 and three years of my life to learn has mysteriously evaporated from my head and I’ll be sitting there, writing “He was a bad man. He shot someone. You shouldn’t shoot people. We put people in jail for shooting other people.”

You went to Yale and you still don’t know that THERE’S NO “R” IN WASHINGTON? And what, pray tell, does the fact that you went to Yale have to do with any part of this little story, other than to boast about how very very awesome you are?