Writing for the Bar

Catalog description

This course is designed to jumpstart your bar exam preparation by developing your substantive knowledge and sharpening your critical bar exam success skills, with a particular focus on writing skills. Specifically, you will do an in-depth review of highly tested topics in several subjects, such as Civil Procedure, Contracts, and Real Property. You will then put that knowledge to use working through practice essay questions. Additionally, you will learn reading, outlining, and writing skills for the Multistate Performance Test (MPT), with a particular focus on point maximization under timed bar exam conditions. You will learn how to develop a strong-but-flexible framework to resolve bar exam problems, sharpen your reading comprehension, issue identification, rule mastery, critical thinking, and legal analysis skills. Traditionally, bar review is a post-graduation, concentrated period of study of around 9-10 weeks for students studying full time, or up to six months of part-time studying for hybrid JD graduates who are still working during bar prep. Because most students will encounter substantive material that they did not see in law school and the overall volume of testable material is so considerable, it is difficult to spend quality time with certain areas of the law and types of questions. Students are often in triage mode due to this juggling requirement. While our class time is not a substitution for the substantive work that you need to complete during bar prep, it is an opportunity to get a head start on two types of practice questions (essays and performance tests) and study them closely. This practice will hopefully lead to an advantage once post-graduation bar prep begins and will help ensure that the total number of practice questions you complete during prep is sufficient.