This is it — after 12 years of grade school, (at least) four years of undergraduate studies, three years of law school, and maybe even an additional couple years of graduate specialization, you are finally ready for the last exam you’ll ever take: the bar. Lawyers all over the country still shake at the idea of retaking the bar exam because for many of them, it was the absolute worst experience of their lives. Encompassing two whole days of rigorous testing, the bar is arguably one of the most difficult examinations in the country.

However, just like any other examination, people who pass are not necessarily smarter than those who fail; in reality, it is all about how aspiring lawyers study the material and practice the routine. After all that schooling — 20 or more years, in total — you should know how to study for the bar exam, right?

Just in case, here are the absolute worst things you can do to prepare for the bar.

READ

You need to learn the material, so you figure there is no better way than just to sit down and power through the texts. However, after only a few minutes, your mind starts to wander, and after a few more minutes, your eyelids start to droop. Passive reading isn’t enough to transfer the crucial information from the page to your brain.

LISTEN

Some bar exam preparation guides produce audio tapes covering material expected to be on the test. These tapes can be exceedingly useful, but only as review after you’ve properly learned and studied the information. Listening to these tapes is most often just another tactic used by lazy law graduates looking to passively absorb material. The simple fact is that you cannot passively review information you haven’t yet learned. Read the rest of this entry »

By Melissa Woodson

While coursework is critical in law school, it is often a summer internship that leads to your first job in the field. For this reason, it can be as important to perform well and network efficiently during the summer months as during the rest of the year. The days of summer vacation are long over, but a good internship will be a rewarding experience where you take on your first real responsibilities in law and make lasting connections with others in the field.

Here are a few tips to guide you along the way:

1. Communicate Your Expectations to Your Supervisor

At the beginning of the summer, you should reflect carefully on your goals and expectations for the internship. Share those thoughts with your supervisor both as a reality check and to establish a shared understanding. Your goals and expectations may evolve over the summer, but if the internship is a good match for you, your supervisor will provide pathways to meet them. Read the rest of this entry »

If you are applying for law school this year, you might want to start celebrating because you will have less competition than any other applicants have had for the past 10 years. The Law School Admission Test recently reported that it administered fewer tests this year – only 84 percent as many as it did last year. The number of tests taken has failed by 25 percent in the past two years.

This decline in the number of people who are taking the LSAT could be a reaction to the view that the legal market in the USA is in pretty bad shape. This means that the 45,000 law students who are expected to graduate this year will have a hard time finding a job, which might be causing new applicants to rethink their decisions to pursue a law career.

“For a long time there has been this culturally embedded perception that if you go to law school, it will be worth the money,” said Kyle McEntee of Law School Transparency, an organization that specializes in law education policy. “The idea that law school is an easy ticket to financial security is finally breaking down.” Read the rest of this entry »

Judith Sheindlin, better known as Judge Judy, was born on October 21, 1942. Sheindlin was born Judith Susan Blum in Brooklyn, New York. Her parents are Murray and Ethel Blum. Sheindlin attended James Madison High School in Brooklyn.

After high school Sheindlin attended American University in Washington, D.C., where she majored in government. Sheindlin then enrolled at the Washington College of Law, at American University. She was the only woman in a class of 126 students. Sheindlin completed her law education at New York Law School, where she graduated in 1965. In 1977, she married Jerry Sheindlin, a judge, and legally became Judy Sheindlin. Sheindlin passed the New York Bar Exam in 1965 and was hired as a corporate lawyer for a cosmetics firm.

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Geraldine Ferraro was an Italian-American attorney, politician and a Representative in the USA House of Representatives. She is possibly best known for being the first female Vice Presidential candidate  and the only Italian American to be a major-party nominee for this position; she ran with Walter Mondale. EDUinReview will now take a look at the education background of this intelligent woman.

Geraldine was born on August 26, 1935 in Newburgh, New York. Her parents were Antonetta and Dominick Ferraro, both Italian immigrants. She had three older brothers, but two died during their childhoods. When she was eight, her father died of a heart attack, leaving her mother to raise the family as a single parent.

Geraldine attended Mount Saint Mary’s school until her family could not afford the school; she then attended the parochial Marymount Academy in Tarrytown, NY. She graduated from Marymount in 1952 and then received a scholarship to Marymount Manhattan College. In order to pay or her education, she used scholarship funds and also held up to three jobs at the same time. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in English in 1956, making her the first woman in her family to earn a college degree.

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The LSAT, or Law School Admission Test, is a test that anyone wanting to go to law school must take for admittance. The LSAT is a standardized test that typically takes a half-day to complete and is only given four times per year. There are five sections of multiple-choice questions on the test, each taking 35 minutes to complete. The multiple-choice questions of the LSAT fall into one of three categories: reading comprehension, analytical reasoning and logical reasoning. Being able to successfully answer these types of questions helps measure your perceived level of success in law school. One of those sections is actually not scored, and that section is typically used to introduce possible new test questions.

There is also an essay, or writing sample, portion of the test that takes 35 minutes. Although the writing section of the test is not counted towards an overall score, it is sent to all of the schools that students are applying to for admission. Read the rest of this entry »

It does not sound too far-fetched: some college students form a group and set restrictions concerning who they want in their group. Fraternities and sororities do it every day, concerning gender restrictions. Academic groups set restrictions concerning GPA standards.

However, when a Christian campus group applied for official recognition at University of California‘s Hastings College of the Law, it was rejected because it required members to share its religious views and views on marriage. The student group sued the school, and the case went to the Supreme Court. Today, the Supreme Court ruled against the student group. The main conflict was the school’s anti-discrimination policies versus the student group’s First Amendment Rights, mainly those of religion and association.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the school was “caught in the crossfire between a group’s desire to exclude and students’ demand for equal access, may reasonably draw a line in the sand permitting all organizations to express what they wish but no group to discriminate in membership.” Read the rest of this entry »

Image via GradeInflation.com

Can you imagine waking up one morning, logging on to your school account, and realizing that you GPA had jumped 0.333 over night? I’m sure I would celebrate, but also be completely confused. However, if I went to Loyola Marymount Law School in Los Angeles, I would not be surprised at all. In fact, I would have been expecting it.

Since 2008, at least 10 law schools have altered their students’ GPAs by making their grading systems more lenient, according to the New York Times. These are major universities we are talking about also. Some of the schools practicing this grade inflation include New York University, Tulane University, and Georgetown.

Why would they do this?

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Actor, husband and father of twin girls, Jerry O’Connell, 35, recently enrolled in law school at Los Angeles’ Southwestern Law School.

Even though he began his acting career at a very young age (think the chunky kid Vern in the 1986 hit “Stand By Me”) and continuing on with television shows and more movies, O’Connell has always dreamed of heading back to school. And while his wife, Rebecca Romijn, is busy at work on the series “Eastwick” during the day, he is busy, very busy, taking care of their twin girls, Dolly and Charlie. So when she comes home in the evening, he heads out the door with his backpack and books in hand for night classes.

Talk about a true Renaissance dad! Read the rest of this entry »

Want to go to college for free? Tuition free colleges, although they are hard to find, have been around for awhile. But how about a tuition free law school?

The University of California, Irvine has a brand new law school — and if you’re one of the 60 students fortunate enough to get in this year, you can get yourself a full scholarship for all three years of law school.  The school is hoping this unconventional method will attract the best law students in the country, and will catapult the school into top rankings its first year out.