Cram, Cram, Cram

LAWYERS Cram, Cram, Cram The law's last vestige of ordeal by fire is a legal torture called the bar exam. In New York, for example, it is a 14-hour grind that requires coping with 40,000 facts in order to solve 192 legal conundrums of which the simplest might be: Is a promise made by A to B and C, to induce them not to rescind their contract, enforceable by B and C against A?*

Mastering the particular rules of a particular state has habitually been the key of admission to the bar of that state. Yet most U.S. law schools shun rote rule learning in favor of broad theory and legal reasoning. The great schools are the most detached. Bright Harvard-men, steeped though they are in constitutional law, do not necessarily do any better on bar exams than graduates of less prestigious schools that teach more local law. Last summer 73% of Harvard's candidates (and 65% of all candidates) passed the New York exam, as did 73% from Fordham.

50 Lbs. of Law. This is the situation that sparks the law graduate's summer mania: weeks of rule-stuffing at cram schools in preparation for the twice-yearly bar exams typically given in late summer and winter. Run by lawyers, judges and professors, cram schools are often big business. Before becoming a federal judge, New York Lawyer Harold Medina crammed 800 students for $28,000 a year. Medina's heir, New York's nonprofit Practising Law Institute, is now the biggest cram school, with three yearly sessions enrolling 1,800. At $75 tuition, it is also one of the cheapest. By contrast, the California Bar Review Course charges $175 and grosses more than $400,000 a year.

Started ten years ago in Los Angeles by U.S.C. Law Professor G. Richard Wicks, the California Bar Review (or "Wicks Course") is now attended by 1,200 of the 1,600 law graduates cramming for next month's California bar exam--a three-day inquisition spanning 16 subjects, some of them not taught in top law schools. The ten-man Wicks faculty claims to cover the equivalent of an entire law-school year in eleven taut weeks, during which students plod through 50 lbs. of course outlines. In addition to these labors, worried crammers often spend Sunday supplementing Wicks with a $125 exam-writing course run by a Los Angeles lawyer named Beverly Rubens, who soothes her charges by chirping that after they pass the exam, "you'll have your new briefcase and dark blue suit, and who will I be to you? Just another woman lawyer."

IRAC & Preachers. Unlike law schools, which minimize memorizing in order to stir thought, cram schools are devoted to organizing the student's knowledge with forced-draft methods. Chicago's ebullient crammer, Thomas J. Harty, spends seven hours a day firing off questions, listening to the class consensus, then firing back the correct answers. The method works so well that one year 92% of his students passed the Illinois bar exam. Denver's Gerald Kopel, a former newsman-turned-lawyer, crams his students by simulating actual exams and blasting bad spellers for such barbarisms as adultary, devorse, drunkedness. Austin Lawyer Arthur ("The Garrulous Greek") Mitchell, who claims to have crammed half the lawyers in Texas, dramatizes the "life" in the law. "I tell them the law is comical, the law is tragic, the law is real," says Mitchell. "The things that happen in law are things that happen to people."

Acronyms are favorite cramming tools. Wicks students use IRAC (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion) to crack almost any exam question. A whole year's law-school course in contracts is reduced to PACIFIC CAT DID, each letter standing for a critical legal factor--P for parties, A for assent, C for consideration, and so forth. At New York's Practising Law Institute, cases in which a published and mailed notice suffices to get service in a civil suit, are summed up in MINISTER--Matrimonial actions, In rem property actions, Nonresidents, Incompetents and infants, Stockholders, Traveling residents, Extended statute of limitations and Resident fraud.

Necessary Evil. None of this preparation prevents some exam takers from ludicrous answers. But in most cases the schools serve the bar examiners' seeming demand--what one Tennessee law dean calls "a Pavlov dog reaction." Says he: "It would be horrible if universities taught people how to pass law exams. We should teach people how to think and act like lawyers, not how to memorize cases." Many bar examiners are now steering toward that standard. But most law schools and bar examiners are still so far apart that the only way for law students to travel from one to the other is via the "necessary evil" of cram schools.

*Answer: Of course.

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