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Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 25
| It was the best bar review course for the DC bar exam
I am not even from the DC area, but out of curiosity I found this article for you. Sounds like it was a bar review course before Barbri played monopoly:) Quote:
oe Nacrelli’s Bar Review
Who among us, having taken Joe Nacrelli’s bar review course (“Legal Spectator,” June 2003), could ever forget that experience? Black-letter law, including a now long-misplaced list of what I called “Nacrelli’s Legal Gems,” statements that he actually, truly, really made during class. Unfortunately, the only one that I recall, 38 years later, is “The law does not favor criminals.”
Remember gems like those and you’d pass the bar exam. I did and I did.
—Philip R. Hochberg
Jacob Stein’s column about Joe Nacrelli reminded me of the bar review course I took in 1964: Joe had one—and only one—joke. He advised us not to use the term he or she in formulating our answers. He said use of the masculine gender would suffice, because everyone knows that men “embrace” women.
I wonder how long Joe continued to use that line.
—Phil Ehrenkranz
Jacob Stein raises two interesting questions about the bar exam: should it continue and, if so, should it be national? Assuming that the exam is, or can be made, adequate to sort out those who are ready to enter practice, the first question almost answers itself, and I for one find it hard to disagree with Mr. Stein about the second.
Given a bar exam that actually does sort out who is competent to practice and who is not, a third, equally interesting, question arises: why should we require that candidates follow a particular route—college degree and three years of law school or four part-time—and rule out the oddballs such as the Abraham Lincolns who go the self-study route, or the whiz kids who reach competence online?
“Are you competent?” is, pace Milton Friedman, a question that the bar should ask before it turns a new member loose on the community. “How did you get that way?” is, I suggest, none of its business. I assume, of course, that the object of the exercise is to protect the public and not to hold down the flow of new-entrant competitors. Perish the thought!
—Brian A. Jones
Bravo to Jake Stein for questioning the value of the bar review and bar exam industry!
For me the bar exam was intellectually insulting. Passing the bar exam meant only that I could study the material tested on the exam, and then answer an appropriate number of questions correctly. The exam couldn’t determine whether I would be a good lawyer. And it certainly didn’t show whether I knew anything about my area of practice: federal telecommunications law.
All the time and money that is spent by all those involved in the bar review and bar exam processes could be better spent in other ways. A $2,000 bar review fee could buy an 80-hour one-on-one tutorial on writing from a professional instructor, or a 40-hour one-on-one tutorial on the use of computers for legal research. This would be a vast improvement over the research and writing instruction that is often provided by upper-class law students who are not necessarily skilled in teaching and have better things to do with their time. It could also help make up for the fact that law school professors rarely take time to go over exams and papers one-on-one with their students.
A law degree should be sufficient for entry to the legal profession. Examinations on irrelevant areas of law do nothing to improve the service that clients receive.
—Sue Bahr
Jacob Stein’s article on Joe Nacrelli’s bar review was both touching and reminiscent. I believe that most of us graduating from a Washington area law school in 1965 and intending, or hoping, to practice in the District of Columbia ended up sitting humbly before Joe as he went through his marvelous histrionics, his threats of failure, and his cajoling to success.
I suspect that everyone who has taken Joe’s course has a tale or two, but I have one that may be unique. For reasons having to do with Connecticut practice requirements, I, then a Connecticut resident, had to sign up for admittance to the Connecticut bar before entering law school in the District. Once here and in my final year in school, I accepted a job with my present firm and was faced with the prospect of taking two widely separated bar review courses and exams. So I decided to send my wife, an elementary school teacher, to the summer Nacrelli course, while I headed for Connecticut (I even missed my graduation ceremonies at Georgetown). My instructions to my wife were “You write when everybody else is writing. When they aren’t, you don’t.”
My class at Georgetown contained only a few women, including Marna Tucker, who went on to become a president of the District of Columbia Bar. So my wife, who had never met Joe Nacrelli—none of us had at that point, if I recall correctly—attempted to be a very unobtrusive member of the crowd on the first day of the course. But she didn’t even make it past the door when Joe grabbed her by the arm and demanded to know who the devil she was and why she was there. She explained that she was standing in for her husband, a paid member of Joe’s class, while he was at another course. Joe grumbled something about the competition and about kids today, and let her enter his hallowed halls. We never learned how he was able to single her out of the crowd of unknowns.
The upshot was that for half the course my wife didn’t write as directed. I relieved her midway and using her notes, which turned out to be invaluable, I managed to keep Joe’s passing record intact.
—Don Libretta
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03-04-2008
