Took Admin Law in the Spring, have found it valuable already.

I've been told by several lawyers in my firm that Conflicts is very valuable.

I'm taking Admin Law this fall. It seems like it should be valuable. I just hope it's easy crammed in between Con Law and Evidence.

Someone told me to take the classes I wanted to take and not worry about what's a bar course, or whatever. I have not found that advice to be at all inappropriate or unhelpful.

Bar Bri will prepare you for your bar courses better than any class in law school will. Take the classes you want in law school.

Also, I recommend taking bankruptcy. Just about any area of law that you practice will intersect with bankruptcy. You will be glad you took it.

Yes, taking "bar courses" is an exercise in futility, but saying so almost inevitably falls on deaf ears.

If you are applying to clerkships, you must take federal courts. Period. If you plan to do anything remotely connected with litigation, you should take federal courts and conflicts. I would have found an accounting course to be useful, but I do estate litigation: ymmv.

Professional responsiblity is good. Knowing the rules well enough to pass the MPRE is probably good enough.

Criminal Procedure will, if my experience is any guide, be full of people with loud opinions that may or may not annoy you. Same with Con Law IV.

I fourth the advice about ignoring the bar. Friends say it actually hurt their bar performance. Take classes that interest you.

Since I might be taking the bar in more than one state (ugh...will cross that bridge when I come to it), I should know this: which non-1L bar courses are the most state-law specific? Remedies? T&E? I think Crim Pro is taught based on the federal rules, but are you tested on state rules?

I can most easily see myself taking a pass on a state-specific bar class, since I don't plan to take the bar in the state where my law school is located, and they're unlikely to teach the law of any other state (assuming they ever teach any state law there ;)

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Stop worrying about preparing for the bar! Take the classes you want to take, or you will be filled with a tremendous amount of regret in several years when you realized how much of your law school experience you wasted away.

You're a smart cookie--start acting like one! :)

To answer your question more directly, every common-law subject area is state specific enough that the broad, generalized rules you'll learn in class do not give you any particular advantage. That was my experience (bar exam in Illinois), although others may differ.

I can't strongly encourage you to take the advice of your loyal readership:

GET AWAY FROM THE BAR CLASSES. NOW.

They are pointless if you are only taking them because they are bar classes. If you are honestly interested, AND more interested in them than alternatives, then take them. If you've been told they'll help with clerkships (like FedJur or Conflicts) then take those, but there is no reason to worry about bar review now.

Please. Listen to Adam. Listen to everyone. You're wasting your time and your one and only law school experience.

Entertainment law is meh, FYI, or it was last year. It was like the short bus version of privacy + copyright with a little bit of contracts thrown in for good measure.

I'd agree with the advice about Admin Law, I've found it terribly helpful in a lot of spots. Professional Responsibility is a requirement here, so that was a given. Roman Law, while fun is still rather unuseful anywhere. That is unless you have some sort of thing for Justinian.

Admin was helpful. I truly regret not taking negotiation. I worked for an Admiralty lawyer for a while - talk about specific. Lawyer less than a year, and conflicts of laws was very helpful, especially since it was not covered at all in Civ Pro.

Again: forget the bar stuff, especially if you're taking the bar somewhere else. I went to school in Michigan and took the Ohio bar, and bar bri had everything I needed. Relax already about the bar. It's hard, it sucks, but bar bri will cover it. Law school prepares you in the sense that you can write a coherent argument, and the essays are like mini-exams. You get that from any class. You especially get it from classes you enjoy.

You won't ever get the chance to enjoy law school classes again (probably). For goodness sakes, take the ones you like. Everything practical comes later.

Roman Law is compulsory in Cambridge and even though I got an average grade on it last year I enjoyed it so much that this year I took the follow on paper. Loads of fun. (Not that your course is necessarily anything like what we do, but still)

I disagree with the idea that taking bar courses is necessarily an exercise in futility. I did not take Wills & Trusts in law school. I regretted not taking it when I was "learning" it during BarBri. I especially regretted not taking it when it showed up as a bar exam question.

I think that our BarBri lecturer (Conviser) taught Remedies incredibly poorly), so I'm glad that I took it during law school (even though it wasn't my best course).

I walked out of the BarBri lectures on Criminal Procedure because the lecturer (Whitebread) was so incredibly irritating. I did take the Criminal Procedure course during law school and enjoyed it.

If you are good at learning things by a self-study approach, then leaving bar subjects for BarBri can work. But if not, then taking the bar courses can often help. Also, some subjects (e.g. Constitutional Law) are more suited than others to being learnt on one's own or from the BarBri lecture.

I highly recommend taking Negotiation (I didn't and I regret it). I also recommend taking Administrative Law (even though I never did). Federal Courts would be good, especially for a clerkship, even though I found it fairly dry (but that might have been the professor). An Advanced Civil Procedure course might be good also.

Hey, what about an Advanced Legal Research course? :)

Take Bankruptcy. It is an absolutely fascinating little self-contained legal universe driven by economics and logic. You will love it. It is also immensely practical, as someone above noted - there is virtually no aspect of law that doesn't intersect with bankruptcy in one way or another.

Taking class to just pass the bar is wasteful. Bar-bri will absolutely give you what you need. You are only in law school once - take what you think you need to take to practice, and take at least one class for the hell of it.

Some further explanation:

The multistate is a multiple choice exam based on a finite set of rules that you must learn from BarBri. Bringing anything you learned in class on those subjects to the test will only confuse you. It's a closed universe that has nothing to do with the real world.

Covering all of the required subjects for the state-specific portion will take all of your course time, and most (vastly most if not all) of the time in class will be spent covering material that is not state specific and will not help you answer the question on the test. BarBri will tell you the specific things that are likley to be on the exam, and only those things.

For example: I practice in the field of trusts and estates. I took four courses in the field of estates, estate planning, and estate taxation in law school (four and a half if you count Property), doing very well in all of them. I read about trusts and estates in my leisure time.

I did not take BarBri.

One of the questions on the bar when I took it was a wills question, which boiled down to this: what happens to a gift to spouse in a will if you subsequently divorce. I did not remember the answer for my state. I guessed wrong.

But I still passed. In my jurisdiction, the state specific essays seem to have been graded something like this:

Able to spell? One point.

Able to identify question as a secured transactions question? One point.

Vaguely familiar with concepts relevant to secured transactions, e.g., perfection and priority? One point.

Seems to understand the question? One point.

Knows the answer? Extra credit.

Don't worry about the bar exam. You will pass.

I'm not going to continue beating this dead horse re the bar courses being useless for the bar. It is true. We've all told you this repeatedly. In all seriousness, too much outside knowledge is detrimental to your bar-taking ability.

From a professionally useful standpoint, I'll second the calls for bankruptcy. It's very useful for both litigators and corporate types, and it's very nuanced and detailed. Class time well spent.

T&E I think would be helpful knowledge in general (although, repeat, not for the bar-related reason). Crim Pro and Con Law IV are only to be taken if you actually are interested. Think of them as fun courses rather than substantively useful ones. Securities and Fed Courts should both be useful.

As for conflicts, I personally found that courts don't look at the conflicts issues, because they tend to be too complicated, and so they apply their own law except for particular issues where the law of their state and the potential other state differ, and then they found a way to reach the same result under the laws of both states so as not to have to render an opinion on conflicts laws, which they didn't understand anyway.

Well, JCA, it seems as if you've made your decision re: bar courses already. The pleading of your devoted following notwithstanding, you find one person who has a journal and follow her advice to the exclusion of all others.

I haven't taken the bar yet, so what do I know.. but I imagine your readers have a good idea of what's necessary and what's not. More to the point, I suggest asking people at your school of law what they think. I imagine the bar is a very different experience based on where you go and what test you take. The few friends I have who just finished the CA bar, friends at your law school, said that the classwork they took during their legal education were not only worthless, but harmful.

Instead of fighting this deluge of advice, why not seek out some from people in your situation... and make an honest accounting of all advice, both for and against your preconceived ideas, and make an educated choice?

Friend,

I think that we should just leave her alone. If taking the courses helps her sleep at night, then she should go ahead. Anyway, there's something to be said for taking classes that expand your horizon beyond what you might otherwise have taken. I took courses because I thought it would help with the bar and, although it was pointless as far as the bar was concerned, it was a good thing overall.

That said, I do have a specific warning. Wills is a good general class to take for bar prep, if you must, both because it is probably the most commonly tested of the state specific areas and because Wills profs tend not to be the type of teachers who limit themselves to the abstract or to "bleeding edge of the law" issues. However, do not fall for the "every lawyer should be able to write a will" line. In theory, maybe. In practice, don't do it.

Also, I second the vote for Conflicts being useless in the real world. Courts just steamroll over choice of law problems, and the rest of Conflicts is mostly just a rehash of CivPro.

Friend,

Asking people still in law school what they think about the necessity of taking bar courses is, IMHO, a fairly worthless idea. I do agree that a lot can depend on the person and on the bar exam they plan to take. The CA bar exam is not one of the "candy bars" that some states have.

It is possible to learn some things from scratch from BarBri, but the more you have to learn from scratch, the less enjoyable your summer will be.

Examination statistics for the CA bar exam can be found here.

I can't agree more with the theme of these comments, i.e. "bar courses" are a general waste of time, effort, funds and attention. The bar exam is not something that your 2nd and 3rd years are designed to prepare you for. In my opinion, having passed the VA bar, I likely could have passed with Barbri and only my first year courses. That being said, however, not everyone is comfortable with this arrangment and thus go through education expecting professors to "teach to the test." Not only IMHO is this the worst way possible to approach any education, but it simply cannot be done. As one person put it, you only need to get a C- on the Bar to pass and to accomplish that you only need to know about 1/16 of what you learn in law school. Law school is not designed to teach you to pass the bar, or even to "practice law," rather it is designed to teach you how to think analytically and approach legal problems. Everything about the Bar you learn from Barbri or other courses and everything about the "practice of law" you should learn over the summer in summer employment positions, or on the job.

If after that lengthy rant you still need course advice here is how I would suggest thinking about things.

1) Courses that you would like to take or sound interesting get top billing.

2) If you have any interest in clerkships (espcially federal) you MUST take Federal Courts or else you will be hopelessly lost.

3) If you have any desire to work for the government or in hightly regulated feilds, ie, securities, transportation, labor, environmental, areas that the FTC has jurisdiction over or patents, you should take Administrative Law

4) If you have any interest in family law or have a large extended family that likes to free ride on the professions of others than Wills and Trusts might be a good idea.

5) If you have general interest in legal theory than consider classes like Conflicts of Law and Jurisprudence, if you don't have this interest than please skip these classes.

6) Litigators should consider any advanced civil procedure course, conflicts of law, remedies, and as many trial skills classes, advocacy classes as well, I suppose that negotiation classes fall into this category, but since I didn't take any I can't say for sure.

Oh and just as an aside, Criminal Procedure should be a required course at every law school and is for every student regardless of your field of interest. It is a slightly mistitled class beacuse it normally focuses exclusively on the 4th 5th and 6th Amendments and the legal issues that surround them.

From personal experience I think the classes that helped me the most to prepare for the bar were Wills and Estates, and Trusts. I think though that this was because I had good teachers and nothing more.

I agree with everyone else though that you don't need to take every bar course. Which ever bar review program you choose, they will teach you what you need to know. Right now use what's left of law school to select the classes that you're interested in. I mean, you only get to do this once.