Barbri

I have been hearing about the ridiculousness of bar review classes from the very beginning of law school. Everyone goes through it, after all. Thousands of law graduates, every year. I think usually the urge is to write about unique experiences. This is not one of them. But that's part of what makes it so bizarre.

After paying $125,000 to study the law for three years, I graduated on Sunday and then began on Monday this new course to study the law again, only in two months, for another few thousand dollars. I was literally back in class not 24 hours after receiving my diploma, to learn in three days the same subject I spent a whole semester on in my first year. And then I will spend another three days covering another subject that took another semester during law school, and after we've covered everything we learned in law school, we'll spend a few more days here and there covering all the things we didn't learn in law school.

This is strange enough. What makes it even more surreal--and again, this is an experience almost every single American law student goes through--is that it's all done by video. I pack my computer in my bag at home, catch the bus to GW Law School, walk up the stairs to the second-floor lecture hall, sit down, and for four hours a day watch the larger-than-life image a of a professor projected on a screen. And in law school lecture halls all over the country, this same video is being played, like we were all watching the moon landing or something. If you get there early, you can hear the morning class watching the end of the same lecture, and if you stay late, you'll hear the night class watching the beginning again.

So far, the professor has been great; lays out the law really clearly and tells funny stories to help us remember the material. But I will never actually meet him. We laugh at his stories, but he'll never hear us. I really can't overstate how odd it feels to catch myself genuinely laughing at one of his jokes, and to see everyone else in the classroom laughing, at a picture on a screen. I guess it's no different than going to the movies.

But it is different. It's completely different. We're studying for the bar exam, to be qualified as lawyers. That's not at all like watching a movie. And since the majority of students go through bar review with this one company, most of the bar exam takers, who come from all different sorts of schools with all different sorts of course requirements and offerings, will all only be thinking of the same lectures by the same professors on the days of the exam. I'm both looking forward to and dreading the moment when in some huge conference hall or ballroom in an Albany hotel, everyone turns to the same question about a hypothetical that today's professor made a great joke about, and we will laugh at the same time, the way all 20 of us kids in my AP Physics class laughed at the same time when we saw a question we definitely hadn't covered in class.

This is how people become lawyers in this country. Strange days.