Monday, June 09, 2008

What You Didn't Know You Didn't Know

The bar review period is now well and truly under way. Already, students find themselves falling behind, for a number of reasons. For those attending Bar/Bri, the assignment backlog is starting to pile up. Although on any given day, the workload seems reasonable, the material is scheduled so that every single day, a student must be operating at much closer to 100% than any other period except finals. Further, there are no weekend breaks, and the entire program is about 10 weeks long. In essence, many people are learning first year law school material all over again.

The Stud himself has fallen behind as well, and in his efforts to catch up, he stopped reading some of the preview materials, which means that when he does practice multiple choice questions, he sometimes gets thrown off. But more interestingly, in one of the sample essays, he got thrown for a real doozy: "There's a First Amendment right to attend a trial?!" First, if anything, the amendment one would most expect to find that in is the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees a right to a public and speedy trial.

So, as with many others, the Stud finds himself learning things he didn't even know that he didn't know.

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