Laura Bergus

In just a few hours I’ll take my first law school exam. I expect it to be hard and very anti-climactic. I have two more to go after this, spread out over the next 10 days, so there won’t be too much to celebrate this evening. Today it’s torts, a test written by an anti-trust legend and father of one of my former employees. Amazing how all my classmates wanted to know about the prof’s son, when there wasn’t much to tell beyond how talented at video he was and that he had the most subtle and hilarious sense of humor. Not sure how that will help them today, but whatever.

Right now I am nervous about not freaking out enough. So many of my peers are reporting being up all night, cramming for the last week, hanging out in the room where the test will take place. I’ve been watching Star Wars (Episode IV, of course) over and over again with Evelyn. She wants to be a stormtrooper so she can work for Darth Vader, who is mean, she tells me, but it’s only a movie. It’s not that I’ve been slacking off, as I’ve certainly done my fair share of studying, but it’s not like this is the kind of thing that memorizing fact patterns or Restatement numbers will really help with. When finals are over, I will have to wait a few weeks to get all my grades back. So it’ll be January before I know if my Star Wars way of review was on target or not.

And the bulleted list for today: what I know I’ll need to know for the exam:

• The Coase Theorum
• The Hand Formula and Carroll Towing
• Various Cardozo nuggets of wisdom
• Holmes on the development of negligence as a standard of liability
• The importance of Vosburg v. Putney
• Many, many more things, but not:
• Nuisance
• Defamation