Don't ever try to show that you're smarter...

Right now I'm studying for the bar exam, which is just over a week away. One of the things that you're supposed to do to prepare for the bar exam is to write mock essays. Well, I have now learned hard and fast that I really need to dumb myself down for essays in certain areas of the law. My first Con Law essay was all about a law regulating tobacco advertisements near schools to prevent minors from being exposed to it. Unfortunately, this was one area that I allegedly knew too well since I spent an entire class devoted to that very issue. This meant that I knew the test that, in real life, would have been applied in this narrow situation (limiting minors' access to commercial speech where the subject matter is illegal for minors to purchase or consume). My first reaction when I looked at the fact pattern was, "Sweet, this'll be no problem." Unfortunately, that test was too specific for the person grading my essay. Instead, I was just supposed to generalize everything and pretend that I had never heard of this test before and pretend that this had absolutely nothing to do with minors or illegal products. I might as well have been writing about a city that wanted to ban all advertising of fiction books within city limits. If you can't be a lawyer without passing the bar, then I would've been more likely to become a lawyer if I never set foot into a single law school classroom. Fuck this shit.