As Wife Studies Law, So Does Husband

BAM ACTS. Decoded, that is a list of specific-intent crimes: Burglary, assault, murder(intentional), attempted murder, conspiracy, theft and solicitation. BAM ACTS is a memory device for law students who are taking the California State Bar Examination. Anyone who lives with a bar candidate learns such mnemonics involuntarily.

I am among the thousands who last summer agonized over the examination from the sidelines while our spouses or significant others endured the three-day ordeal. On July 30 and 31 and Aug. 1 about 8,000 women and men took the exam and turned in carefully guarded papers identified only by number. By now each number has a score that will indicate pass or fail to candidates who have been waiting for four months.

For me, as for my wife, it all began four years ago with two complex procedures: taking the Law School Aptitude Test and applying to law schools. Each involved long waits for results. After a top-notch Los Angeles law school accepted her, I watched her go through three years of intensive lectures, library research and home study--a full-time occupation, a complete preoccupation of 60 to 80 hours a week.

Took Over Housekeeping

Since I had encouraged her to study law, I had a commitment to fulfill. I neglected my own pursuits and, like numerous other spouses of law students, determinedly pitched in to support her through the bar exam. I took over all the housekeeping--shopping, cooking, serving, doing dishes, running errands, paying bills, answering the phone and door bell, protecting her from interruptions while she studied. At times I functioned as an amateur psychologist, buoying her up when her mind grew numb and her morale sagged.

Most crucial of all, and most novel and interesting for me, I became a fellow student, a proxy professor, reading her manuscripts and quizzing her on her outlines. Often I read cases that puzzled her--and then me--and we discussed the legalistic reasoning until we found our way at last through the labyrinth of legalese, citations and triple negatives.

I watched, impressed, as she, like the other students, read thousands of pages in 1,700-page textbooks, highlighted miles of key lines with yellow markers and played back tapes of lectures. She made outlines of course notes, then outlines of outlines, in typical law-school fashion. I learned that most professors gave no quizzes or midterms. Everything depended on the final, which usually consisted of a long, intricate, improbable, hypothetical legal problem. (In one contracts class, the question itself took up eight single-spaced typed pages. She worked eight hours on that one.)

State Bar Exam in Ethics

This went on for six semesters. During the last year she also had to pass a special State Bar exam in legal ethics. In her final semester she had to complete her application to take the bar--no simple task in itself. This meant supplying photos, fingerprints, character references, transcripts and voluminous personal data (such as every residence and every job since age 16). She had to account for every moment in her life merely to be eligible to try the exam. She took the sixth and terminal set of finals, and one day in May she received her Juris Doctor; one day of respite, relief and celebration.

Immediately she began the marathon called Bar Review, which consumed her waking hours and troubled her sleeping hours every day and night for eight weeks. The private company that conducted the review charged a handsome fee in return for skilled, professional summing up of the 13 subjects that the bar exam might ask about.

I found myself caught up in an intense, even feverish activity that virtually blotted out all normal social life, family life and conjugal life. Quiet, quasi-desperate study of law became the one and only activity. An orientation lecturer on a bar review cassette urged students to keep their routines calm at all costs until after the bar. Make no big decisions, he said. Allow no big distractions. Keep the same residence and car, the same habits for eating, drinking, smoking, taking drugs and engaging in sex. Avoid any changes in human relations that will disrupt life and interfere with studying.

In those weeks I often drove her an hour each way to the lectures, where she took hundreds more pages of notes to add to the thousands made during the previous three years. En route she listened on the car stereo to cassettes that reviewed the same material. At home she made more miles of yellow highlighting on the special review books. She wrote practice essays that readers graded and mailed back. She took diagnostic pre-tests and reinforcement/review tests and multiple-choice tests and simulated all-day examinations. She attended extra workshops for all these kinds of exams and a workshop on techniques for taking exams.

Flash Cards, Flow Charts

She bought commercial flash cards and also made her own flash cards to catechize herself on technicalities. She made flow charts and diagrams to delineate the logic of certain legal relationships. Following expert advice, she studied her home-made outlines, commercial outlines, capsule outlines and mini-outlines. She then reduced each of the 13 subjects to a one-page checklist, which she memorized in the final hours.

For better understanding, she read aloud to me many difficult pages and explained them or asked me to explain them. We went over and over particularly troublesome areas: the Hearsay Rule with its 30-odd exceptions (Evidence), the Commerce Clause (Constitutional Law) and the Rule Against Perpetuities (Wills and Trusts, Property) that some states have outlawed as archaic and confusing.

We went over the exact meaning of legal “terms of art” such as replevin and bona fide purchaser . We noted the special legal uses of formerly innocent words such as constructive , privilege, conversion or reasonable (that grand and variable legal label). We reviewed buzz words and obligatory terms, indispensable to writing about Constitutional Law, such as suspect class, strict scrutiny, prior restraint, chilling effect, rational basis, or clear and present danger . She explained to me once again concepts that puzzled and amused us, such as the fertile octogenarian , the slothful executor and the unborn widow --all key terms in some inheritance problems.

I learned without surprise that not all the students made it through bar review. Those with unsurmountable personal problems dropped out, maybe to try again six months later. Others collapsed temporarily but returned in a few days, desperate to make up lost time. Many showed all the signs of exhaustion and stress: frequent tears, pale, pimply faces, tired bloodshot eyes. Most were mutually supportive, exchanging advice on how to organize, how to memorize, how to eat and on what sleeping pills or tranquilizers were the most effective.

After the formal bar review ended came two weeks of sheer obsessive memorization, aided by every known trick and device. Inevitably I learned all the mnemonics, not only BAM ACTS but other picturesque acronyms such as I DEMAND COPS for the defenses or justifications for crimes: Insanity, Drunkenness, Entrapment, Mistake, Age, Necessity, Duress, Crime prevention, Others’ defense, Property protection and Self-defense.

During the six half days of the exam, she wrote six essays, two performance tests, and--hardest of all, answered 200 multiple-choice questions, some of them a page long, with each of the four choices a paragraph long. For seven or more hours a day she worked under murderous time pressure.

Temporarily neurotic about the risk of car trouble or traffic tie-ups, we had, like many others, chosen to stay in a hotel a few minutes’ walk from the site she had selected to take the exam. The first morning I led her to a vast concrete exhibition hall, half underground and waited until the doors closed. At noon she staggered back to our hotel room for a quiet picnic lunch and for whatever solace and courage she could glean from me or from the cheerful, colorful, supportive signs our daughter had taped up around the room and on the bathroom mirrors: “Give ‘em hell, Mama!” “Pass or fail, we love you.”

Between sessions she described the elaborate and necessary precautions that suggested penitentiary existence--guards at the doors and in the restrooms, no phones, purses left in the corridor, Kleenex and other necessities carried in closely scrutinized plastic bags, each candidate fingerprinted and assigned a seat where his or her photo lay in place, and vigilant proctors constantly in motion, sometimes asking candidates to write miscellaneous bits of information such as their mother’s maiden name, just to make sure there were no impostors. As each session began, as candidates faced a sealed packet of questions, the head proctor in a portentous voice read the rules and instructions.

Exam Completed

At 5:20 p.m. on the third day I stood with other spouses, lovers and supporters outside the examination hall. The candidates sat in their places for a 15-minute eternity while proctors collected the last papers and checked off numbers for the last time. The Voice announced: “This concludes the examination. You are dismissed.” Or is that what he said? For a great shout went up.

The die had been cast. Each candidate had irrevocably committed answers to readers and computers. Of the four years, only four months of waiting remained.

November’s days pass slowly. On Wednesday the State Bar will mail the word: pass or fail. For the 8,000 directly concerned Californians, apprehension will hang over the Thursday normally dedicated to survival and success. The day after Thanksgiving, or the day after that, the results will arrive at our home, addressed to my wife, finally no longer a number, and we will have the long-awaited “point in time” when she opens the fateful envelope.

Statistics are against her. Records show more candidates failing than passing. One recent year only 27% passed. Even graduates of the most prestigious law schools claim to be far from confident. Many students try again from two to five times. Some never pass.

I know that law holds together our civilization. It is more universally binding than religion or government. Tedious, sophistic, manipulative, fascinating, essential, it gives order to human lives. I could go on building a eulogy to--or a diatribe against--the law. But for the rest of this month my mind-set, far from dealing with abstractions, is identical with my spouse’s. Will she pass?