The Finals Season

Well it's been since mid-April, and wow how things have changed since then. We will start with an entry on finals season, which flew by. I finished up the bibliography issue and turned my attention to three days of work before starting the focus on finals. On Saturday I sat down with some fellow JDR peeps Julie and Larry and I ripped through Larry's outline in 2 days, making fixes and changes along the way. Monday morning Larry and I met with Nick and Jeff at Caribou and I got another cup of the magic Earl Grey. We hammered out some fine points of law and went to Wendy's for another gastrointestinal-safe pre-finals meal of chicken nuggets and such. I honestly did not feel 100% prepared, but we had a great outline for the class.

So we get into the exam and the multiple choice section is an absolute nightmare. Professor Johnson puts a state code in the back where only parts of the Uniform Trust Code and Uniform Probate Code are adopted, and even those are changed in some circumstances just a little bit. Everything left out is common law. What this means is for every single stinking question, you are forced to double check the law in the back of the 40 page exam packet and then your outline before even thinking about answering. I spent too much time on this and rocked into the essays. The first was an in-depth trust question which I rocked I think. The second was a four-part wills question. I got through the first part, sped through the second, and wrote about a sentence total for the last two parts combined. Ick. So much for time management. I think maybe a solid B on this one, an A if I rocked the multiple choice (which is my strategy, but this multiple choice was a nightmare).

The next exam was on Friday and it was Professional Responsibility. With having to study for the MPRE twice thanks to snow and Greenbaum's exam being on the exact same subject material, I knew spending more than a day would be killer. So I went to work two more days to get away from it all, then came back and really just breezed through a JDR outline, changing it enough to fit my own needs and make it my own. This only took about 4 hours. So I definitely blew off this exam, but it was not that hard. We had at least a half hour too long on this one, but I wrote to the gun because that's what you do. I felt like I covered everything except reporting requirements in the essay (which literally covered about everything in the course, a real disaster of a fact pattern), and did OK in the multiple choice. I figured a solid A.

Now the final exam of my law school career I took more seriously than any other since I ripped through Business Associations in 4 grueling days. Again it was Larry and I, and this time I spent four days meticulously ripping through his outline while he stayed a little ahead of me each day outlining the course. After 4 days of rip-roaring discussion including a lively debate on supplemental jurisdiction and the limits imposed. It's funny how absolutely giggly and ridiculous your sense of humor gets after 4 days of intense studying. The bar exam is going to be a trip...but I was finding the funniest mis-spellings in my class notes. That makes sense, considering I spent more time in that class playing Tecmo Bowl and Scheherazade than taking notes. There's just a limit to some professors, and while I love Greenbaum...by the second session every day he did not really have enough to keep me interested. Plus Civil Procedure is pretty simple...there's just a hell of a lot of topics covered. I cannot imagine the old days a decade ago when Civil Procedure I and II were combined into a year-long 6 credit hour first year class. That would be a nightmare! Anyways, we were rocking longer than most as Civ Pro was on the last day of regular finals. It felt good just to finally get to the final exam.

I thought it would feel special or like an accomplishment to go to your last final, but we got in there and it felt like just doing business. By the time we got to this last one, as a 3L you just go in there and laugh at all the super-serious 2L's while rocking the exam out as best you can. More scantron multiple choice goodness, and these were much harder than his Professional Responsibility questions. Unlike PR, I thought our outline was key to rocking the essays as well. There were some gray areas, but this should be another A.

So the finals were over, in a blink of an eye. We had decided after a couple breakdowns that we should have the moving company pack the majority of our items once we found out the estimate was a couple hundred below what the firm was willing to shell out. We still spent the Thursday after finals going through boxes and getting rid of over a truckload to goodwill and half-price books as well as countless bags of trash. Moving is a big pain, but at least it gives you a chance to go through and cut down on the useless belongings, of which we probably still have too many but we got 80% of it out this time.

So on to Hooding weekend...