Frany

hello everybody!

I am a foreign attorney (Italian) and I'm going to send all forms required for be admitted to take the CA bar exam.
I have a lot of doubts...If I buy an Ameribar course can I prepare myself for the CA bar exam if I don't have textbooks of law school? (I attended law school in Italy so I don't have any textbook concerning US law!).

Are the lectures-outlines enough for learning all I need for the exam (without having textbooks...)?

or it's better that I buy some textbooks and then the Ameribar course?
tahnks for the help!

fra

Category: CA - California Bar Exam

nobbig24

I am a former teacher at a national law school and a private tutor for law school and the NY Bar Exam. I have taught many non-US lawyers. You have to realize that you are taking a difficult task as a lawyer taking a US bar exam without a US legal education. For example, for the NY bar, law graduate with a US JD generally have an 80% pass rate, while lawyers whose main education has been outside the US have a 40% pass rate (and that includes people with a US LLM, which is often not very helpful for bar exams).

There are essentially 3 problems that you face. One is the language barrier, not surprisingly. The second is that you will have to learn a lot of new legal rules, some of them very unfamiliar -- European and US law are not all that different, but they are different, and some basic concepts are also different. Third, American legal reasoning is often different from the Civil Law system -- American law is less interested in logic, and as you probably know, law handed down by judges is significantly more important.

I would at the least buy a complete set of books from a major bar review course, like BarBri. Attending their lectures or videos of lectures would be helpful. DO NOT just buy law school textbooks or treatises (textbooks for lawyers). Bar exams have certain areas of the law that are much more likely to appear, and even certain subtopics are unusually popular.

I might be able to provide some assistance in becoming familiar with how US lawyers think. I do a fair amount of work electronically. You can contact me at nybartutor@nyc.rr.com. Richard H. Levenson