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Well, that was just awful.

After a performance on Saturday's Corporations exam that can only be described as shameful, I've got only one exam left to go this term--the dreaded Evidence final.

And, much to my chagrin, I have discovered that I am not nearly as sharp on evidentiary questions as I have been. Of course, all that time off thinking about Corporations--or nothing at all-- has probably dulled me. But as I go through the materials one last time, I can't shake the feeling that I seemed much better at this during the regular semester.

Well, that went well, for infinitessimally small values of well.

I was a sickly child growing up. I suffered from pneumonia several times. I will never forget the feeling of terror, waking up in the middle of the night, unable to breathe--my lungs straining, my heart pounding, and me coughing and sputtering, drowning like a fish in air. It was the feeling of breathing and getting nothing, of being acutely aware of the lack of air.

That was how I felt for a fair bit of the last exam. I totally whiffed on one question. I could not have drawn a bigger blank even if I tried. I will be lucky to get any points at all.

After that, it was damage limitation. I had to suck it up, cut my losses, and try to move on to questions I could answer.

Corporations tomorrow. I have no idea how ready I am. I'm not sure I'm worried. I'm worried that I'm not worried.

Here goes.

I had spent days preparing.

My professor had already told us that our Constitutional Law exam was going to deal with the issues in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board. I had read the opinion several times. I spent two days locked in a room with a classmate going over possible lines of attack, working through hypotheticals, pushing through all the doctrine we could manage.

I left the law library late on the eve of the exam, exhausted. I could barely think about anything except the exam. As I came down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk, I was siezed by a sudden overwhelming panic. It struck me hard, a terrible punch in the gut that doubled me over, breathless and nauseous. I stopped and dry-heaved once, wondering whether I was about to throw up the contents of my stomach--and then remembered that, other than coffee, there was nothing left to throw up.

I went to bed and slept fitfully. I was able to arrive at school early enough to stop by chapel before the exam. I knelt and prayed silently. I was not alone.

The exam began. I had prepared, but I was not ready. I fumbled issues, mismanaged time, scrambled to address all my major points. All of my preparation boiled down to a few badly-scrawled words that I hope only my examiner will ever read.

It is fitting, then, that the last sentence of my exam is unfinished. It is as incomplete as the arguments it was meant to advance, and as inartful as its author.

Given my sorry performance, I will be lucky to survive.

Constantiter construo constitutiones constitutionaliter, cum constitutionaliter constitutiones construendae sint.

I don't know. I really don't know. The best I can say about the Contracts exam is that it was what I thought it was.

I think the thing that's getting to me most about these exams is that I don't know where I am, or how I stand, or what.

Contracts tomorrow, first thing.

Again that eerie calm.

I'll be going to bed early tonight.

Perhaps the most enduring proof, to me at least, of divine mercy is this: when I have to sit an exam, at least it's beautiful outside.

I remember exam terms as an undergraduate, bent down by the weight of a years' worth of unread books and undone work. At the very moment when it would have been absolutely unbearable to continue, I could look up at the Backs, with their daffodills nodding in the breeze, or the heavy smell of blooming flowers in the Scholars' Garden. There were afternoons when it seemed that it might be more pleasant to meet Death than to sit an exam. But then, looking around, I would laugh to myself--it would be such a shame to have to leave now, with the flowers blooming.

Today, the first snow of winter--an inch, maybe a little more--is settling down all over DC. Just enough snow to change the way that we see our daily routines, but not nearly enough to prove a major distraction or disruption. As ever, there is the eerie silence of snowfall, the muffled whoosh of passing traffic, the white-on-white glow. Commuters follow their breath to work and school.

And in the midst of all this, I sat a Torts exam.

I wish I could tell you that I aced it. I wish I could say that there was nothing on the exam that was beyond me, that I walked out of there, into the afternoon snowfall, brimming with confidence.

I can't.

Just as advertised, today's Torts exam was a four-hour exam administered in three hours. I could easily have spent another hour or two poring over the last fact pattern, looking for the wheels that turned within the wheels, following each and every lead.

I couldn't.

You will be tempted, our Torts professor warned us last week, to keep working on it until you get that familiar, warm feeling of having done well. You will not get that feeling. You cannot expect it.

The only thing I felt coming out of this exam today was cold. The snowflakes falling on my coat shimmered, seemingly taking forever to melt as I walked back to the Metro. As I hurried for my train--not wanting to spend forever waiting at the platform--I looked out on the snow falling over the university buildings, the freight tracks, the station.

Such a pity to have to leave it early, I thought. It's snowing.

Torts exam tomorrow.

There's really nothing more I can usefully do. I've done my reading. I'm as comfortable with the doctrine as I'm going to be.

I feel strangely calm. So much is riding on these exams, I know, but the only thing I can see now is the test itself.

At last, my Torts outline is substantially complete. Barring the correction of thematic errors at the final review session (possible) and the correction of minor typographical errors (not likely), this is what I'm memorizing for the exam.

The funny thing about finally completing the Torts outline is this: Having finished it now, there's nothing on it that surprises me. So I have an extensive guide...to the ruts I've been in for the past several days.

I'm typing this in a large reading room in the main university library. Of roughly seventy available seats in this room, only five are occupied. This is a massive contrast to the law library. It's not really all that crowded in there, but one does get the sense that the place is being used fully. I guess we law students are only too aware of what's at stake in our exams. The urgency just isn't there among the undergrads.

That said, this library is remarkably agreeable. It seems built along the same lines of the UL in Cambridge--in fact, it feels like a half-scale model of the UL. There's a certain comfort in that. The only shame is that there aren't narrow work tables and chairs shoehorned in amongst the general stacks. My preferred workspace in undergrad was desk next to a barred window on North Front, Floor 4.

"Time!"

My study group was taking a practice Contracts exam. On any ordinary day, this would have made us the very exemplars of scholarly diligence. On a Friday afternoon, after the last class of the day, sitting in an empty classroom, we looked like we were serving after-school detention.

I'd like to think that I'm usually pretty sharp at Contracts. It is my favorite first-year course so far, after all. But I just wasn't feeling it this afternoon. I was missing issues. I spent too long making utterly irrelevant arguments. I mischaracterized the facts--fatally so. In other words, had this been the real thing, I would have failed it utterly.

Somewhere in the back of my head, I could hear my Contracts professor warning me.

"You'll either get an A or a D in this course. Don't make me give you the D."

Objectively, we had a good session. We covered all of the major issues. We were able, among the five of us, to see where we should have gone with the analysis. But no matter how productive our review session, I couldn't escape the creeping sense of dread. The exam is in four weeks. I am not yet ready. I need to be ready.

"Don't worry," says one of us. "Nobody in this room is going to fail."

We turn and look, doubtfully.

"I checked his grade distributions. OK, so he doesn't give out any As. But I'm pretty sure, given what we've done here, we're at least at Cs."

We are still dubious.

"So we're going to survive summary judgment?" I say. In the back of my mind, I hear my professor's voice, reprimanding me for missing an obvious issue:

"C'mon. I'm not asking you to win. I just want you to avoid summary judgment!"

"Yes. I think we're going to survive summary judgment."

I'm still not so sure. We adjourn. I linger in the atrium for a while, chatting. Finally I start walking for the Metro station.

Delays on the Red Line. I finally make it to Metro Center and change to the Orange line. I file onto my train. I am too upset to read, or think, or do anything. I can only sit and mull over my spectacular failure in this afternoon's practice exam.

A frail, wizened old woman shuffles onto my train. She finds a seat. We get to Farragut West, and she asks the young people sitting across from her where she is.

"Is this Dunn Loring?" Her voice is shaky, her accent doubtful. The young people can't hear her.

"No ma'am," I say. "This is Courthouse. Dunn Loring's a long way off. I'll let you know when it's coming up--I'm riding out that far."

She is grateful. "Thank you very much," she says. "All of you, thank you!"

The young people get off at Courthouse, and I slide into the seat across from the old lady. She took the Chinese bus down from New York--"the City, you know, the bus that leaves from Canal Street"--to visit her great-grandson. She'd spent the whole afternoon on the bus. Her great-grandson's mother had promised to pick her up from DC, but at the last minute had bailed out and told her to go to Dunn Loring instead.

"This has been the longest part of the trip!" She told me, exasperated. It was quite a journey for her--she was hobbling on a cane and a broken hip.

We came onto Dunn Loring. She thanked me and told me to take care of myself. Imagine that--she told me to take care! She thanked me again.

I told her to be careful. And then something unexpected came out of my mouth--I thanked her.

I had spent my whole afternoon dwelling on how terrible I was, how hopeless my exams seemed. And now all--almost all-- of the bitterness was gone. The work is important, yes, very important. The stakes are high. But there was something wonderfully liberating about doing the human, decent thing and helping a lost person get found.


The old lady couldn't see very well, but she made me see a little more clearly.

So the LSAT is on Saturday.

Am I nervous? You bet. In fact, I'm freaking out. I have already started to calculate my odds of admission at various law schools based on my practice scores. Suffice it to say that many institutions will profit by my application, and only by my application.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: I hate the LSAT. It's an arbitrary, nearly meaningless, exercise that has little bearing on a working attorney. At work, I see mountains of paperwork. There is the elaborate kabuki of procedure, the curious, terse poetry of regulations, the cut-and-thrust of negotiation and advocacy--but I have not yet found an instance where I might conceivably be called upon to conclude that Peter and Quinn must ride in a red truck to the sewage treatment plant or else the abbatoir, accompanied by a cage containing at least four but no more than six parakeets.

I can talk to you at length, and with a fair amount of familiarity and ease, with the ins and outs of the grounds for validity and invalidity of United States patents. But of course, that doesn't matter to the LSAT examiners.

In fact, nothing I've done in my life seems to matter to the admissions process. All of the guidance I ever read is directed to undergraduates contemplating law school immediately after their first degrees. All the guidance assumes an undergraduate who gets a GPA of x at an acceptably American institution, who then scores y on his LSAT.

Well, that's not me. I got my BA. Burnt out and spent a year in torpor. Got my MSc and then decided that academia wasn't going to be the life. Woke up from that sleepwalk and into more torpor. Then some oddjobbing. My best academic references are too old to be of any real relevance--my graduate supervisor never even really saw me all that often during my brief MSc stint, and in any case, that was three years ago. My best advocates from my undergraduate days have seen a lot of Cam water flow under their bridges. My contemporaries are all happily qualified: solicitors, medics, researchers, accountants.

What am I? 25, oddjobbing, and trying to beat out kids who have been planning for this their whole lives. When I was 21, I was too pure for my own good. I was going to stick it out, sleepwalk into academia, and wake up thirty-five years later, covered in glory, wrapped in my long gown. I wasn't going to whore myself on the milkround. I didn't know I'd wake up at 23, disoriented and without direction.

I suppose I should be thankful. There are plenty of kids I'm stacked up against now who are only just finishing their first degree at 22. I've gotten two, worked two dead-end jobs, and had two long, soul-crushing spells of unemployment. I'm older, sure, and definitely more bitter. But I also know just what's at stake, more than they can possibly know or understand. I know what I'm getting into, and I know what I'm getting away from.

But none of that tells me if Alice or Bob is wearing a silly hat when they perform first or last in the talent show.