5 ms·

It is difficult to comment without sounding obnoxious, but having taken the bar exam, I found the exam simple. Surprisingly simple. I think it was the single mo

It is difficult to comment without sounding obnoxious, but having taken the bar exam, I found the exam simple. Surprisingly simple. I think it was the single most over hyped experience of my life. I was fed all this insecurity and walked into the convention center expecting to participate in the biggest intellectual challenge in my life. Instead, it was endless multiple choice questions and a couple contrived scenarios for essays. It may also be surprising to some to understand that legal writing is prized for its degree of formalism. It aims to remove all connotation from a message so as to minimize misunderstanding, much like clean code. It may also be surprising, but the goal when writing a legal brief or judicial opinion is not to try to sound smart. The goal is to be clear, objective, and thereby, persuasive. Using big words for the sake of using big words, using rare words, using weasel words like "kind of" or "most of the time" or "many people are saying", writing poetically, being overly obtuse and abstract, these are things that get your law school application rejected, your brief ridiculed, and your bar exam failed. The simpler your communication, the more formulaic, the better. The more your argument is structured, akin to a computer program, the better. As compared to some other domain, such as fiction, good legal writing much easier for an attention model to simulate. The best exam answers are the ones that are the most formulaic and that use the smallest lexicon and that use words correctly. I only want to add this comment because I want to inform how non-lawyers perceive the bar exam. Getting an attention model to pass the bar exam is a low bar. It is not some great technical feat. A programmer can practically write a semantic disambiguation algorithm for legal writing from scratch with moderate effort. It will be a good accomplishment, but it will only be a stepping stone. I am still waiting for AI to tackle messages that have greater nuance and that are truly free form. LLMs are still not there yet.

euroderf 2y ago
> It may also be surprising to some to understand that legal writing is prized for its degree of formalism. It aims to remove all connotation from a message so as to minimize misunderstanding, much like clean code. > The more your argument is structured, akin to a computer program, the better. You certainly make legal writing sound like a flavor of technical writing. Simplicity, clarity, structure. Is this an accurate comparison ?
- ChainOfFools 2y ago
  it is called a legal code after all
  - kergonath 2y ago
    “Code” in that sense predates pretty much any form of computer or technical writing. It came from the same word in old French in the 14th century, which itself came from the Latin codex. It basically meant “book”. Now of course it is specific to books that contain laws.
    - Suppafly 2y ago
      >“Code” in that sense predates pretty much any form of computer or technical writing. That's still cognate with the concept of computer code.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  recently I read a US law trade magazine article on a particular term used in US Federal employment law.. the article was about 12 pages long.. by the second page, they were using circular references, and switching between two phrases that used the same words but had different word order, contexts and therefore meanings, without clearly saying when they switched. By the third or fourth page I was done with that exercise. As a coder and reader of English literature, there was no question at all that the terms where being "churned" as a sleight of hand, directly in writing. One theory about a reason that they did that in an article that claimed to explain the terms, was to setup confusion and misdirection as it is actually practiced in law involving unskilled laymen, and then "solving" the problems by the end of the article.
- airstrike 2y ago
  IANAL but have about a decade of experience negotiating contracts in M&A, and I think the comparison is very apt for that particular context, at a minimum. Maybe more so than other parts of Law where there can be an element of persuasion to any given argument.
- 2y ago
A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
I took a sample CA bar exam for fun, as a non-lawyer who has never set foot in law school. Maybe the sample exam was tougher than the real thing, but I found it surprisingly difficult. A lot of the correct answers to questions were non-obvious -- they weren't based on straightforward logic, nor were they based on moral reasoning, and there was no place for "natural law" -- so to answer questions properly you had to have memorized a bit of coursework. There were also a few questions that seemed almost designed to deceive the test-taker; the "obvious" moral choices were the wrong ones. So maybe it's easy if you study that stuff for a year or two. But you can't just walk in and expect to pass, or bullshit your way through it. I agree with you on legal writing, but there appears to be a certain amount of ambiguity inherent to language. The Uniform Commercial Code, for instance, is maddeningly vague at points.
- gnicholas 2y ago
  The CA bar exam used the be much harder than other states'. They lowered the pass threshold several years ago, and then reduced the length from 3 days to 2. Now it's probably much more in line with the national norms. Depending on when you took the sample exam, it might be much easier now. Also, sometimes sample exams are made extra difficult, to convince students that they need to shell out thousands of dollars for prep courses. I recall getting 75% of questions wrong on some sections of a bar prep company's pre-test, which I later realized was designed to emphasize unintuitive/little-known exceptions to general rules. These corners of the law made up a disproportionate number of the questions on the pre-test and gave the impression that the student really needed to work on that subject.
- manquer 2y ago
  Obviously you need subject knowledge, that should be implicit? Keep in mind even today[1] ( in California and few other states) you don't need to go law school to write the Bar exam and practice law, various forms of apprenticeship under a judge or lawyer are allowed You also don't need to write the exam to practice many aspects of the legal profession. The exam is never meant to be a high bar of quality or selection,it was always just a simple validation if you know your basics. Law like many other professions always operated on reputation and networks, not on degrees and certifications. [1] Unlike say being a doctor, you have to go to med school without exception
carabiner 2y ago
Genuinely asking: you think the bar exam is a low bar because you personally found it easy, even though the vast majority of takers do not? Doesn't this just reflect your own inability to empathize with other people?

euroderf 2y ago

> It may also be surprising to some to understand that legal writing is prized for its degree of formalism. It aims to remove all connotation from a message so as to minimize misunderstanding, much like clean code. > The more your argument is structured, akin to a computer program, the better. You certainly make legal writing sound like a flavor of technical writing. Simplicity, clarity, structure. Is this an accurate comparison ?

ChainOfFools 2y ago
it is called a legal code after all
- kergonath 2y ago
  “Code” in that sense predates pretty much any form of computer or technical writing. It came from the same word in old French in the 14th century, which itself came from the Latin codex. It basically meant “book”. Now of course it is specific to books that contain laws.
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    >“Code” in that sense predates pretty much any form of computer or technical writing. That's still cognate with the concept of computer code.
mistrial9 2y ago
recently I read a US law trade magazine article on a particular term used in US Federal employment law.. the article was about 12 pages long.. by the second page, they were using circular references, and switching between two phrases that used the same words but had different word order, contexts and therefore meanings, without clearly saying when they switched. By the third or fourth page I was done with that exercise. As a coder and reader of English literature, there was no question at all that the terms where being "churned" as a sleight of hand, directly in writing. One theory about a reason that they did that in an article that claimed to explain the terms, was to setup confusion and misdirection as it is actually practiced in law involving unskilled laymen, and then "solving" the problems by the end of the article.
airstrike 2y ago
IANAL but have about a decade of experience negotiating contracts in M&A, and I think the comparison is very apt for that particular context, at a minimum. Maybe more so than other parts of Law where there can be an element of persuasion to any given argument.
2y ago

A_D_E_P_T 2y ago

I took a sample CA bar exam for fun, as a non-lawyer who has never set foot in law school. Maybe the sample exam was tougher than the real thing, but I found it surprisingly difficult. A lot of the correct answers to questions were non-obvious -- they weren't based on straightforward logic, nor were they based on moral reasoning, and there was no place for "natural law" -- so to answer questions properly you had to have memorized a bit of coursework. There were also a few questions that seemed almost designed to deceive the test-taker; the "obvious" moral choices were the wrong ones. So maybe it's easy if you study that stuff for a year or two. But you can't just walk in and expect to pass, or bullshit your way through it. I agree with you on legal writing, but there appears to be a certain amount of ambiguity inherent to language. The Uniform Commercial Code, for instance, is maddeningly vague at points.

gnicholas 2y ago
The CA bar exam used the be much harder than other states'. They lowered the pass threshold several years ago, and then reduced the length from 3 days to 2. Now it's probably much more in line with the national norms. Depending on when you took the sample exam, it might be much easier now. Also, sometimes sample exams are made extra difficult, to convince students that they need to shell out thousands of dollars for prep courses. I recall getting 75% of questions wrong on some sections of a bar prep company's pre-test, which I later realized was designed to emphasize unintuitive/little-known exceptions to general rules. These corners of the law made up a disproportionate number of the questions on the pre-test and gave the impression that the student really needed to work on that subject.
manquer 2y ago
Obviously you need subject knowledge, that should be implicit? Keep in mind even today[1] ( in California and few other states) you don't need to go law school to write the Bar exam and practice law, various forms of apprenticeship under a judge or lawyer are allowed You also don't need to write the exam to practice many aspects of the legal profession. The exam is never meant to be a high bar of quality or selection,it was always just a simple validation if you know your basics. Law like many other professions always operated on reputation and networks, not on degrees and certifications. [1] Unlike say being a doctor, you have to go to med school without exception

carabiner 2y ago

Genuinely asking: you think the bar exam is a low bar because you personally found it easy, even though the vast majority of takers do not? Doesn't this just reflect your own inability to empathize with other people?