I want to start by thanking my public for all of their good wishes, prayers, and burning of stuff. Okay, you probably shouldn’t have burned stuff, but its all over now and you know, that’s what firefighters are there for. I had a lot of questions in my comments over the last several days (can I ask what’s so great about haloscan if no one ever puts a trackback on your trackback thingie?) that I will address in due course, but we must now get to the important matter at hand. The TEST.
I was really nervous when I got to THE TEST. I got there around 8:30 and went inside the hotel, a Hilton. I thought oh, that’ll be nice. WRONG. I don’t know if there is anything nice in Pikesville. Parts of it look like this part of Albany County called Menands (which we called Mynads and thought it was sooooo funny) and its just dreary and depressing. But the lobby of the hotel had one of those fake fires and I sat in front of it. It was the only place left to sit because every other piece of furniture was covered with test takers and their heavily tabbed books. Query: Doesn’t there come a time when the tabbing really does you no good. There were people there who had every page of the code books tabbed and I wondered, what the hell? How are you going to find anything with all of those freaking tabs? But, whatever, its not my problem. There were people studying. Studying – for an open book test. Do you know where the stuff is in the book? Can you find it quickly? That’s what the test is about, right? I sat in the lobby for a bit and chatted with a guy from California who was taking the test because he was doing some “very involved complex litigation” for friends of his in Maryland. Are you kidding? How much could you possibly be charging these ‘friends’ that you couldn’t find someone in Maryland to take the case. He didn’t have any of his own books, but borrowed a couple from 2002 and then borrowed a Courts book the night before. But, he seemed pretty confident. There was a group of people sitting in front of me talking about MY MAN, the mayor and how he was going to run for Governor. Blah blah blah. They were trying to play it super cool.
So then finally we went into the testing room and there couldn’t have been more than fifty people. Just like in every test, the proctors were all ninety years old. They were telling us how to write in the exam book, go from front to back just filling in the front of the pages until you get to the end. If you need more pages, start from back to front on the opposite sides. Then there was something about turning the book upside down and a whole room full of lawyers looked dumbstruck. Finally I asked granny proctor “do i turn the book upside down?” and the answer was ‘yes’. I mouthed this to those around me who looked bewildered and off we went.
The guy at my table was really nice, from Northern Virginia. Oh yeah, when I was walking in I met a woman who was telling me how she didn’t really need to pass this bar because she is already barred in another state (we all are, dipshit, or else we couldn’t take this exam) and how it didn’t matter because her father is really sick and will be handing his law practice over to her. I didn’t ask her, she volunteered it and it sounded like she was glad her father was sick, was proud that the reason she was taking it over was because he was taking the highway to heaven. She was an ass, I decided.
So, the test. There was something on it about joint and several liability and a whole bunch of numbers. I looked it up. Local government liability caps out at 200,000. MD has a cap on non-economic damages of 650k. Poor Claire was not going to get all 850 in non-eco damages the jury awarded her because of the cap, and she was only going to be able to get 200,000 from the county. But that wasn’t really her problem because she would have to get the other money from Bill and then Bill and the county could duke it out. That was my answer. Then there was another question about Betty Boop being mad because the cable company charged her a 20 dollar late fee. She wanted this Stopped! You, and your crack legal mind, find out that the late fees are illegal. What’s the fastet way to stop the cable company. I dunno. Honestly, dunno. So, I wrote I would get an injunction, and wrote out all the rules for an injunction. I wrote I would try to get a TRO. I wrote that at the same time I would initiate a class action lawsuit. What the hell do I know, I’m a criminal defense attorney!!
So then there it was, my time to shine. A criminal law question with all of these gorgeous bells and whistles. The fact pattern took up an entire page. And then the question was “Did Sandra Swam (the attorney in question) preserve the objections at trial for appeal” Yeah, that was it. One of the issues in the fact pattern was sentencing. The maximum sentence was 18 months for the crime that the defendant was charged with, but he was sentenced to 2 years. When you make a motion for a new sentence, what will happen? Ummm. . . unless the lawyer is a crapass (which he very well could be) the motion will be granted because the sentence is illegal.
Then there were a bunch of ethics questions, etc. You know, typical shizmit. I don’t get results until the end of May. Crazy people. How long does it take to grade fifty tests? They are just asslickers (hey, I used ass in a very clever way twice in two paragraphs). So, now I’m going to work on some more resumes.
Thanks again to all of you who sent good wishes. Hopefully, things will turn out okay. You never know, though.
