ending the celebration

Posted on by Luis Villa

Law school, even when you’re done with it, has ways of beating you down. In this case, it is the lack of preparation for the bar. In the next two months, I have to learn several topics I hadn’t previously learned, and re-learn several topics about which I know a lot of theory and very little practice. I’ve also got to move at the end of this week, which already puts me behind schedule for the studying. As a result, I’ll probably not be very digitally sociable from now through August.

Two tools that are going to make that a little easier:

  • As usual, leechblock. Truly excellent for defining your workday. (I know I was on semi-vacation the past two weeks because I turned off leechblock.)
  • Anki– libre, multi-platform flashcards to help me memorize all the various stuff that I have to stuff into my head in the next two months. Includes sync and a web-based version so I can work on my phone or across multiple laptops.

The celebration, while it lasted, was pretty nice. Some things that got done this weekend with my parents in town:

  • lots of good food: at Dizzy’s at Jazz at Lincoln Center; at Blue Hill; at the awesomely yummy yet fairly reasonable Kuma Inn; at the awesomely yummy yet totally cheap Caracas Arepa Bar.
  • music: Dizzy’s had music too- Bill Charlap trio. I think the music critic-approved phrase is ‘spectacular display of piano virtuosity.’ Also saw In The Heights again (first musical I’ve ever seen twice); still spectacular.
  • museums: went to the Museum of Art and Design to see their glass and industrial ceramics exhibitions, and to the Guggenheim to see their Frank Lloyd Wright retrospective. Both highly recommended.
  • walks; the weather has been terrific and we’ve been able to walk quite a bit, including some time in a gorgeous Central Park yesterday.
  • friends: shout out to the close friends who ended up at the impromptu hat party!

So really, I can’t complain too much… now back to the grindstone.

Published by Luis Villa

7 thoughts on “ending the celebration”

  1. No, let’s be clear, Luis: you now need to learn *everything* about the law, none of which you learned in law school. See, the best law schools teach virtually no black-letter law. I remember when I started studying for the bar and was shocked to discover that it’s wrong (really!) to run people over with a car, that it’s illegal (gasp!) to steal things, etc.

    The wonderful part of it, however, is that you finally get to correlate all that high-minded theory with the daily drudgery of real law. I found it refreshing.

    And, nervous though you may be, you’ll do fine. Really. You’ll end up studying at least 2,000 percent more than you need to, so I’d just recommend that you take a measured approach to your preparation. You’re not going for high honors. You’re just looking to pass.

    1. Hehe. That’s not completely fair… I recognized at least a half-dozen terms in contracts and con law. Torts, on the other hand, might as well have been taught on a different planet for all the good it did me…

  3. Congratulations and good luck!
    Random bar exam memories:

    Most useful technical tip: None of the possible answers is correct. Two can be discarded quickly. Of the remaining two, one is more wrong than the other.

    An outline framework, even with gaps, was a thousand times more useful to me than random fragments of memorized knowledge. (I’m not big on flashcards.) I spent a lot of time typing my bar review lecture notes into a rigid structure (using WordPerfect 4.1 on a two-floppy PC XT).

    Emerging after the second day at the Javits Center, I had no idea whether or not I might have passed. Twenty-one years later, I can not say whether I could have omitted any part of the preparation and still passed.

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