Vindication, Revisited (For Bill Haak)

Thousands of years ago, before I became a lawyer, I sat for the Ohio bar exam. While nearly every aspect of the experience has been forgotten, one peculiar detail has stayed put in my memory since then.

The test, itself, consisted of a dozen or so separately timed essay questions on one day, and another dozen or so separately timed questions on the second.  Each essay question involved a different legal topic, ranging from property law, wills and trusts, constitutional law, criminal procedure, civil procedure, et cetera.  Each topic was the subject of only one essay, so that you knew at the end of the first day, by process of elimination, which topics remained to be tested on the second day.

Unless. Unless you mistook a question on the first day for one legal topic when its intended subject was actually another.  This would mean two things: first, you may use that precious night between testing to cram study the wrong topic for the second day, and second, you could find a question on the second day that tested a topic you thought was already tested and realize, in the midst of the second day of essays, that you had totally nosedived on a first day essay.

And so, at the end of the first day, circa July 1994, a list of the topics remaining for the second day of testing was circulated by the bar exam prep course people.  One topic remaining on the list for the second day was civil procedure. This was a problem.  I had already answered a question I believed to be a civil procedure question on the first day.  If civil procedure had yet to be tested on the second day, then...

A unique sort of panic set in throughout the hotel that night.  I was not alone.  Others believed that they had answered a civil procedure question on that first day of testing, but it was clearly a small minority. The smartest echelon insisted we had mistook an obvious constitutional law question for a civil procedure question.  After all, it was the smartest echelon that originally reported their first day experience to the bar exam prep course people, who, in turn, posted the controversial list.

Early in the second day of testing, Bill and I found our vindication.  It was an obvious constitutional law question.  This meant that the contested first day question had, in fact, been a civil procedure question and not a constitutional law question.  The smartest echelon was wrong. That shrill, sanctimonious chorus of people we couldn't stand in law school was wrong.  And they all realized it -- digested their collective error -- at the exact same moment, soon after the proctor signaled, "Begin."