Bar Application, Graduation, MPRE & Moral Character Stuff

In case you missed it, here's a summary of today's lunch session with Dean H*rshen about applying for the Bar and going through Moral Character Determination. I'm sure I missed a few things, so if you have anything important to add, do so in the comments.

First, there were handouts. You should read them. Additionally ...

Registration and Bar Application

• It's really important that you register as a law student before you apply for the bar. Those are two separate steps that take time to process, so you can't just do both in one go. The law school told us to register during our 1L year, but if you're unsure about your status, you can check it out here.
• If you're taking the New York bar (or any other bar for that matter), let the Registrar know! The law school will automatically certify graduates for the California bar, but students from other states will need to submit a form to the registrar by a certain deadline. You may also need to submit other forms, like a handwriting sample for New York. You should get all of this to the registrar as soon as possible.

Graduation

• If you have IP grades ("in progress"), talk to your professor soon to get those taken care of. It's bad if you can't graduate because the professor you need to sign off on this is on sabbatical.
• Writing requirements should be done by this semester.
• The registrar will start sending out individual e-mails to students about any missing graduation requirements, starting next week.

MPRE

• If you are taking the MPRE this November, John St*ele will be holding an MPRE review session at 5:30 on Thursday, October 27, in Booth. See K. H*lmquist's e-mail.

Moral Character Determination

• You can fill it out at this link.
• Fill it out now! It takes a long time to complete and to process. Technically, you don't need to have this done until you take your oath in December, but it's best to get this all done before you take the bar, so you don't have to worry about any of this while studying for the bar.
• At least 4 people asked this, but yes, LLM and international students need to go through the Moral Character Determination process as well. If you want to sit for the bar, you have to go through moral determination.
• You need to have your fingerprints taken. Boalt doesn't do fingerprinting, so ask the bar for locations
• It's OK to have a few "youthful indiscretions" on your moral character determination, but it's better to be upfront about this rather than try to hide it. If you fail to mention something, and it comes up later during the moral character review, that's bad.
• Similarly, if you have anything that might impact your moral character determination, like a bankruptcy or criminal record, that you did not mention to Berkeley, you should talk to Dean Hirshen. It's important that information the Bar has about you match the information the school has.
• Even if you've taken a moral character determination in the past, e.g., for a security background check, you still need to do this one as well. But mention the previous one in your application.
• When putting down your employment history, if your employer no longer exists, there should be a box you can check to note this. If your boss is no longer there (but the company still is), just put down the company and boss as is, and let your old company deal with it.
• When putting down the places you resided at, if you were travelling for an extended period of time but didn't have any single particular place you stayed at, just list your permanent residence.
• This sounded weird to me, but when listing the time and places for your your residencies, you also need to note those brief periods during winter or summer break where you were at home.
• A moral character determination is good in California for three years, so if you're not taking the Cal. bar but might at some point in the next three years, get the moral character determination done now.

That's all I have. You can also view posts from previous 3Ls about this process. Feel free to add in the comments.

Live Blogging the Moral Character Lunch

Hey All --

So, having lost my various other forums I will be using Nuts & Boalts to restart my liveblogging of events that I feel obliged to go to that tend to be a huge waste of time. Things are just getting started here, so grab your Gregoire (mmm, skirt steak) and let's get going.

12:38: who are all of these people? Seriously. I like dont' recognize half of the people here. Are 1Ls here b/c they're special? Did we take a bunch of new people?
12:38: Jared Fish wants us to vote. Oh, Lauren Dickey does too. I love her!
12:39: Jared REALLY wants us to vote
12:40: pretty decent showing. Starting to recognize people. Oh, there's M*ndi, she looks really excited about this ...
12:46: there is an undergrad sitting two seats down from me ... he just said, "This isn't going to be so bad, right?" He is 1) wrong 2) proving why undergrads are basically just bigger 8 year olds
12:48: Ann*k is getting things started. It's amazing for her that we're 3Ls. It is terrifying to me.
12:48: I should have at least 2 handouts, I have none
12:49: Joel has them, but is really annoying. Cal Bar Exam: Bus Ass; CP (Fed and Cal); Com. Prop; Ks; Con Law; Crim/Pro; Evidence (Fed/Cal); Pro Resp.; Prop; Remedies; Torts; Wills and Trusts; FML. FOR NY, add Family Law, nix others.
12:50: We have to do something about exit counseling if(!) you have student loans. Also, if you aren't taking NY or Cal, this will be useless(ish) to you
12:51: FOr CAL three steps: 1) register as 1L; 2) moral character; 3) apply for the bar. THE BAR IS NOT FORGIVING. If you don't do these in that order then you DO NOT GET TO TAKE THE BAR.
12:52: For NY: You don't have to reg as a 1L. Instead, you apply for bar, then moral character, then register. Lawyers are SO annoying
12:53: BARBRI: B/c of construction, haven't been barbri here lately. But, we have now given them the opportunity to do it here -- and is VERY likely that if you take CA you will have classes here at Boalt.
12:54: MPRE: There is a Ste*le review Wednesday at 5:30 -- not sure which Wednesday, maybe come every Wednesday until you get it right.
12:55: the really want us to take the moral thing soon. She could not be talking quieter
12:56: sounds like we should just go to the website (http://www.calbar.ca.gov/). She says that this may take a lot longer to fill out than others. I assume she's talking about Joel. You need residences for the last 8 years, employment since age 8 (not just legal, but any employment more than 6 months). Also if you have other licenses, are you involved in litigation (like, not as a representative), 5 personal refernces -- people who know but aren't related to you, and one must be an atty; crim convictions and notwithstanding penal code 1203.4 dismissal you still have to put it down.
1:00: ugh, I'm seriously bored. And people are now asking questions... Why are people this year so question happy?
1:01: small claims court litigation counts (J.)
1:02: note, employment covers babysitting, adult sitting, any other kind of sitting
1:03: On the bright side, only 50-60 people don't pass each year in CA
1:04: This is turning into one of those things where everyone is asking questions that are only relevant to themselves. This is more painful then BizAss
1:07: nice, now we're talking about drug use.
1:09: people have started leaving. I want to be people.
1:10: Chuckles is SO happy he flew back from Europe for this.
1:10: If you don't know which bar you're going to take: you should start figuring this out.
1:12: negative determination is valid for 2 years
1:12: this thing costs 450 dollars to process! WHAT?! Joel is going to have to have to sell his other kidney.
1:13: Also, if you registered for the CA bar when you were a 1L -- like they told us we had to -- and you don't end up taking the CA bar you don't get a refund. "Oh, here CA, take my $180 donation to the bar association"
1:15: The attorney personal reference can be someone you worked for .
1:16: I'm starting to think that this is just some sort of overblown Q&A session -- and I'm freaking out.
1:17: I really wish this lady would talk closer to the mic. Her hair doesn't not look like Antoine Dodson's hair .... hide your kids?
1:19: We're talking about appeals now. Seems like the general appeals process in most settings.
1:20: Great, all my friends just left and now I am the only person in the back row. Thanks guys. That was awesome.
1:24: So, we just found out that we didn't need to register as 1Ls
1:24: TRANSFERS: If you registered as a 1L you will need to go re-register b/c you put in your old school.
1:25: HIRSHEN: If there is something that you are going to report (e.g., past conviction) you need to let the school know AND put it on your report. It needs to be in both places! Very important. This isn't a school requirement it is a bar requirement. Also, if you haven't heard back from the moral character folks by the time the bar comes, you can still sit you just can't get sworn in until you have got the moral stuff back. She also really wants us to do it over xmas. I'm positive I will not be filling out that paperwork during my 5 weeks in Argentina and Brazil.

PETCH OUT!

The Moral Character Application & Memory Exam

I did not go to last week's informational meeting on the Moral Character Application for the California Bar (what's all this business about the food?), but I did get an email with the handouts. Later, I went to the Bar's website and started the application.

Holy mother. An accounting of my location at all times in the last ten years? With my patchwork progress through post-secondary education, career diversions, and general slap-dash approach to important life decisions, it took almost an hour just to create a workable outline. Those months in Guatemala? There are fuzzy patches. That semester off from school in 2002? Come to think of it, what did I do with that time?

I know I am not the only one who doesn't want to blow this. Alumni advice on how to avoid tripping up here, and throughout the rest of the application process, would be appreciated.

A Mitzvah for the Bar

Yay Democrats! But anyway...

I was talking to some 3L friends last week when someone brought up the Bar, asking how and when we register. Collectively, we knew as much about taking the Bar as Rumsfeld did about conducting a war. i.e., no one has any idea what needs to be done, when it needs to be done by, or how to do it. Apparently the MPRE happened last week—I just might have taken it, had I known anything about it.

Last year, I watched my 3L friends go through the same thing. (BTW—they find out results on Friday, Nov. 17^th, if you have friends/family that took the test). bar/bri, moral character, the exam itself—the whole process created mass confusion. The exam is stressful enough—the registration process shouldn’t be. So I want to do 2 things here: first, post as much relevant info as I have; and second, make a suggestion for avoiding this confusion in the future.

1. Dates and Deadlines

A word of warning: I’m getting this info from alums who took the test this past Summer. I’m not guaranteeing that everything you need is here, so don’t assume you’re all set if you’ve done everything on this list. If I have missed anything, please mention it in the Comments, and I’ll add it to this post.

1. Register with the California Bar. Many of you did this 1L year. This is registering with the actual organization, and it will cost you $144. www.calbar.org.
2. Register for the MPRE. The next exam is in March, and you can begin registering in January (I think). Go through the CA Bar website, or go to www.act.org/mpre. There is a fee for this.
3. Register for bar/bri. The earlier you get this done, the better. I believe you can put a deposit of $175 down now, rather than the full cost. This allows you to take the MPRE class. Unfortunately, you cannot guarantee your class site and time for the summer Bar course until you pay the entire fee. It is possible to bill your firm directly, if a firm is covering it.
4. Register for the Bar Exam. Sounds obvious, but a certain alum will tell you it’s not. This has a fee of approximately $500, and can be done at the CA Bar website.
5. Moral Character forms. The sooner you do these, the better, because they take a long time to fill out, and then it can take six months for them to be approved. You cannot be certified until they are officially approved. If you have any type of criminal or academic problems in your past, these forms take an especially long time. The forms are available on the CA Bar website. You need to get a fingerprint scan too—this can be done at the UPS store on Telegraph.

2. The Bar Czar

A lot of the confusion seems to stem from the fact that there is no central repository of information. While there are announcements in the BBB, no 3L actually reads the BBB, and if we do, it’s only to see if we can get some free lunch—we never make it to the back pages. Even if we do read the BBB, there’s lots of other inconsistent info out there regarding the Bar. Last year bar/bri seemed to have different answers every time you called, and it caused lots of unnecessary stress. Heck, they handed out books on only one day, yet failed to inform most students when that day was.

So here’s my suggestion—appoint a Bar Czar. This can just be the 3L BHSA rep, or it can be some kind of appointed position. All the Bar Czar needs to do is find out every relevant date, deadline, fee, etc. for everything related to the Bar. The Czar would also talk to bar/bri at the beginning of the year and get all the info (do we need gold cards? when are books handed out? how do we direct bill?), so that there’s less need for individual students to contact bar/bri directly.

Then put all this info in a handy chart, and email it to 3Ls at the beginning of the year. Then, in the weeks leading up to any important deadlines, send a couple emails to 3Ls (in addition to BBB announcements) reminding us what we need to do.

Taking the Bar really, really sucks. But with a little bit more organization and information, it can merely suck.

CA v. NY (the bar exam faceoff)

Since I'm still not sure exactly where I'll be next year, I have been looking into the differences between taking the California and the New York bar exam. Conclusion: nobody in their right mind would take the California bar exam unless they were really, positively, absolutely sure that they were going to practice law in the state for the next fifty years.

For one, the CA bar is ridiculously expensive. About $200* to register as a law student in California (and if you don't do this, you can't take the bar). Then there's about $500 for the moral character application. (Get this in quick, folks, the price goes up in January) Which seems a little expensive, given that the government does a way more intensive check when it does security clearances and doesn't charge you a dime, tax dollars aside. Then there's the test itself - somewhere in the range of $800. Add another $150 if you want to use your laptop.**

The New York Bar, by way of comparison, costs about $250 as far as I can tell, plus a $100 laptop fee. Incidentally, in both cases, the laptop fee seems to be to cover the license for the ExamSoft software. I'm having trouble believing that the software costs $50 more on the west coast.

Of course, you have to fly out to Albany to take the exam. Which starts at 6 am Pacific time. Plus, unless you're lucky enough to have relatives in the area, you'll be staying at a hotel and eating cheap take-out - not exactly ideal test taking conditions. On the upside, the NY bar exam is only two days long. There are less essay questions, and they're shorter. On the downside, classes at Boalt don't cover NY law for the most part, so you'll have to learn all the state specific stuff during BarBri. On the upside, BarBri does offer a NY course out here.

Both the NY and the CA bar exams are notoriously tough, so it's a pretty even draw there - although NY does have a slightly higher pass rate. All in all, it seems like NY is probably a better bet if you've got a job lined up that gives you the flexibility to choose.

Any alums who've taken both have any thoughts on the matter?


* All numbers are approximated from the online research I did yesterday. If you want to get the actual figures, you're probably better off checking the official websites rather than relying on me.

**What I want to know is, where is all this money going? Does the head of the bar association have a really nice wine cellar funded by law student dollars? Or do they actually do something useful with it, like scholarships or legal aid clinic funding?

How Bar Czar

A question regarding livescan fingerprinting for the moral character app from a current 3L reminded me that co-blogger Max Power has put considerable effort to collect relevant information regarding the CalBar applcation process. His posts are here and here.

Pregunta

I'm filling out the moral character app, and I need to affix any attachments to the inside back cover. WTF is the inside back cover? Consider this an open thread for questions re bar exams. Collective knowledge at this school has always been the way to know what to do (from OCIP to exams), and I'm hoping it comes through in this case.

Dr. Frist: Or how I learned to stop worrying about judicial nominations and learned to love the nuclear option

There's considerable talk everywhere about the possibility of the nuclear option as a means of preventing Dems from fillibustering possible judicial nominees to the Federal bench. Now Jay Ambrose of the Ft. Wayne (IN) Journal Gazzette offers his thoughts on the matter. (Hat tip: Bashman). This idiot's reasoning just might be popular with people who lean right. Scary. Here's why.

He begins the tirade with:

If Democrats in the Senate continue their unprecedented, unconstitutional, undemocratic, unconscionable tactic of using filibusters to prevent up-or-down floor votes on President Bush’s judicial nominees, do not hesitate. Blast their republic-harming impudence to smithereens.

Let's start with unprecedented. There are only 6 previous years that match the current environment. First, until Nixon's presidency, ideology was really not a factor in judicial nominations. So post Nixon, the only times a party controlled the presidency and the Senate were Carter's four years and the first two years of Clinton. Carter took Nixon's ideology bit a step further. Reagan, recognizing a good thing when he saw one, continued. Now for precedent. The DEMOCRATICALLY DOMINATED Senate approved 12 years of nominations from Reagan and Bush that included Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, O'Connor, and countless Court of Appeals judges (cough cough Kozinski here in the 9th to name one bright shining example). That is, as a precedent, the opposition party did not put up much of a fight against the sitting president's nominees. Bork is the exception, but then that was opposed by mod Republicans as well. And frankly, this is cancelled out by Rep opposition to Abe Fortas. Back to square one. Unprecedented opposition to judicial nominations began in 1995 when the Republicans took control of the House and the Senate. The Judiciary Committee made *cough* unprecedented changes to the nomination process (thanks Mr. Helms). So Clinton nominees could reach a vote often only after back-door deals bringing a conservative judge to a seat along with the President's nominee. Odd...sounds like Republic harming to me, but more on that later. In short, there's at least 6 years of direct precedent where up or down votes were not necessarily guaranteed. Got it Jay?

Unconscionable seems to fit with unprecedented, so really, unless you're saying the Republicans have done unconscionable acts (I really don't see how anyone can claim such luncacy), I'll have to assume it's rhetoric without meaning.

This brings us to unconstitutional. Before I get into a discussion of the constitutionality of a filibuster, I need to quote Jay again. This time he talks about the characteristics of the President's nominees to the bench:

In the 20th century, various subjectivist and deconstructionist philosophies took hold, causing some judges to act as if the words in those laws had no discernible meaning or at least no meaning that should take precedence over the moral understanding or political druthers of the judges themselves. Not infrequently, the judges have veered toward leftist solutions, thereby winning cheers from leftists who had not been able to win their way in legislative bodies, the constitutionally designated place for many of these questions to be decided.

President Bush has been trying to alter this course through the nomination of judges whose judicial philosophies make it more likely they will be interpreters than something on the order of a sports official changing the rules of his own accord in the middle of a game. Bush’s efforts become more important now that it appears he will get to make at least one Supreme Court nomination and conceivably several more, perhaps reshaping the nation’s highest court.

In case you missed that, he wants judges who will not change the rules in the middle of a game by changing the rules in the middle of the game. I want to prevent murder by killing. Well, I suppose those who support Ambrose's line of thinking don't find that statement too contradictory. Anyway, the U.S. Constitution commands, "He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments. " U.S. Const. Art. II, Sec. 2, cl. 2. So, Ambrose and others presume that unless specified in the Constitution, nothing more than a majority vote is required for anything. Nice try, but the fact is, "Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member." Art. I, Sec. 5, cl. 2. Get it Jay? No mandate for clear up and down vote. Just like no mandate for the Republican Senate to have hearings on Clinton nominees.

What's left? Undemocratic and Republic harming? Which democracy are we speaking about? The one that did not trust the majority rule? Perhaps you're talking about the People's Republic of N. Korea where dissent really is a danger to state security?

Actually I do want to the Republicans to use the nuke option. As Ambrose gloats:

The nuclear option may be necessary, and if it is, I propose Frist turn to it with a whoop and a holler, like the Slim Pickens character of Major T.J. “King” Kong opening a bomb bay in his aircraft, mounting a nuclear bomb and riding it to the ground–cowboy hat in his waving hand–in the movie "Dr. Strangelove."

Remember the ending Jay? Where the whole world is destroyed because of the Doomsday device which could not be controlled? Remember that world destruction was a consequence of ignoring pragmatism (Sellers' British Captain character) for rash decision-making (George C. Scott and the Air Force general who launches the attack)? Bring on the nuke. But be prepared to have a homo wedding in your backyard as soon as Democrats are in power.

For the time being, I'll just ignore the judicial interpretation arguments. All I ask is that we kinda tone down the bullshit. Each side wants judges who will rule in their favor on controversial issues. However you want to cloak the rhetoric is your business.