Today I began work (well really last night) on professional responsibility review for the California Bar Exam. For those who don’t know, I will be taking the bar on July 25-27th in Ontario. Oh, its great fun. Its, allegedly, one of the toughest two bars in the country, second (or first, depending on who you talk to) to New York’s Bar.
I’ve been working the last month, basically, on this whole studying thing. I’ve now completed a review of:
- Torts
- Constitutional Law
- Criminal Law/Criminal Procedure
- Remedies
- Evidence
- Real Property (that means land and land + houses, as opposed to personal property, like a car)
- Civil Procedure
- Contracts
- Corporations
- Profesional Responsibility
I will be going on to:
- Wills and Trusts
- Community Property
These two topics get two days of pounding on before I get back to work on some other topics. Heaven help me.
Back to Professional Responsibility… This class in law school basically consists of numerous warnings not to be a shady character. We get things like, “don’t force your client to sleep with you to pay for your services.” Does that really need a rule? I’m sorry to say it apparently does. I’m of the impression that “we all have our thing” to quote Jenna Elfman in Can’t Hardly Wait. People screw up, even lawyers who are trained to be precise and not screw up. As much as I like the “legal” way of dealing with
these matters which are described in 31 long pages in the Conviser Mini Review, I wish our society were still such that we could deal with the problems of individuals through the model suggested in the Bible: to exhort one another and to reprove them with kindness and gentleness, bringing them back into the right path. That model does not pertain only to matters of faith, but to all types of living, I believe. When one does wrong, it is another’s obligation to point out that failure, but then to provide reason, means and opportunity to right that wrong. I hope that all would allow others this path and most of all, that I would be beneficial of forgiveness when I fall short as well.
Alright, thats enough random preaching at my non-existant readers. It is time to study more of the codification of goodness that I have to know to become a real lawyer someday.