nomocivpro

And I'm DONE with Civil Procedure. (At least until the bar exam. But that can wait.)

It's nice having exams in the afternoon. I don't have to spend $59 a night at the Abigail Hotel, don't have to trek up to The City the night before with a clean T-shirt and a change of underwear crammed into my borrowed-from-husband backpack next to my laptop and outline and casebook. And taking the local train, several hours in advance of an exam with no time pressure, can only ever be anticlimactic. I almost managed to fall asleep.

Things are so different, so amazingly different from last semester. I didn't go into hermetic seclusion before the exam, didn't focus or purify or meditate on The Swan while gazing into the depths of my locker. In fact, I entirely forgot to bring music, which all the same fails to explain why the theme from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon floated through my brain in the middle of my Rule 19(a) analysis.

But I digress. The exam was three and a half hours and wound up featuring a preclusion question, a joinder of parties question, and an out-of-nowhere three-parter with an intervenor and an impleader and the requisite jurisdictional gymnastics under 1367. No discovery, no pleadings, no summary judgment or post-trial motions or any other such areas that I'd been unable to rehearse on old exams. I was, as it turned out, reasonably prepared for this.

And the panic never came, that spike of adrenaline that juiced me through nearly all of my finals last semester. It didn't even occur to me to try to stay calm. I could have been taking an exam in college, in high school even. A hard one, to be sure, a respectable B, but nothing unprecedented.

But the best part came after the exam actually ended, when I dropped off my SofTest floppy disk at the front desk, signed out, and realized that I was done with Civil Procedure. And I was thrilled at the thought. No post-traumatic-exam stress disorder for me this time. I could actually relish the fact that the exam, and the course, were actually over. "No more Civil Procedure," I groaned in joy as I high-fived friends of mine, still queued up to deposit their floppies in the big blue box. "NO MORE CIVIL PROCEDURE!"

While I'm not convinced I flunked, I still am not feeling particularly stoked about my performance on the exam. I haven't a clue whether it will turn out to be adequate, sufficient or sorely lacking. I do know that I had a brief oh shit moment on the train ride home, when I consulted my outline and realized that respondeat superior liability could not in fact preclude a subsequent claim against a primarily liable party. But then I thought: People who walk out of an exam confident that they nailed it to the wall are the ones who get screwed. People who make mistakes and walk away in fear and doubt tend to get lucky.

I would love to get lucky.

Meanwhile, Property is on Monday, followed almost immediately by Edie, for which I still must complete my outline. Now would be a good time to start.

thus spake /jca @ April 30, 2003 09:13 PM