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Open Thread: How Does Everyone Like Bar/Bri So Far?
Revised and updated; please see after the jump.

Thursday, June 18, 2009 4:00 PM - By Elie Mystal

Javits bar exam sadness.JPGIt looks like there may have been a mini-riot at the Bar/Bri lecture today. Apparently some students felt that the Con Law lecturer wasn’t entirely on top of all the salient issues. We heard from a few of them; here is one report:

I’m one of thousands of BarBri students studying for the New York Bar. I attend one of the Video locations. Today’s lecture was Constitutional Law. The lecturer was Professor Cristina Rodriguez from NYU. She was horrendous. Not only as a speaker/lecturer, but … she also got some points of law wrong on the handout. Barbri had re-recorded the lecture, which is available later today. At my location, students left midway through the lecture. I don’t plan on going to the lecture tomorrow.

Of all the con law profs, how did Barbri end up with one of the worst? Is that all I get with my thousands of tuition dollars?

After the jump, an email that BarBri sent to its students about the Con Law lecture.

UPDATE: Please note that this post has been revised in various respects since it was originally published. In addition, please see the addendum, after the jump.

Again, I haven’t seen the lecture, but something prompted the Bar/Bri people to send the following email to students:

Course Administrators will be making announcements tomorrow to clarify certain points in Professor Rodriguez’s Constitutional Law I Handout.

Upon review of student notes from Day II of the LIVE presentation, it appears that no such clarifications will be necessary for Day II.

Additionally, Professor Rodriguez’s Constitutional Law I lecture that will be posted online later today, was recorded today at our New York Course location in DC where no clarifications were necessary.

Online access to the Constitutional Law I lecture will not count as a “click” under the lecture make-up policy.

Oh dear. Angering students while they are studying for the bar — in the middle of the crappiest legal economy they’ve ever heard about — sounds more dangerous than being a fly around the President.

But perhaps students can learn an important lesson from this. How important do you really think the lectures are? The Bar/Bri books already provide you with every scintilla of information you need to pass the bar.

Good luck, test takers. Remember to save up some of that building anxiety and fear for July — that is when the explosions get really fun.

UPDATE: Our original post did not include the other side of the story. After we published, several sources wrote in to provide it. Here’s what one wrote:

Here’s the list of corrections from the BarBri lecture that everyone was up in arms about. About half of them are misprints in the outline. Most of the others people would have gotten if they listened to what the professor said instead of half-paying attention and just looking to fill in the outline. Another example of law students whining when they aren’t spoonfed.

And here’s what a second said:

I was really kind of pissed, to be honest, to see the story on ATL this afternoon. Obviously it was a big deal to a lot of students and so I understand why you saw fit to post it, but I figured I would forward this to you and let you know how minor the errors were (if you care). For the record, except for the “Privileges and Immunities” vs. “Privileges or Immunities” slip (if it is one), she quickly corrected herself with respect to all the other errors. She misspoke a few times, as is clear from the Clarifications email, but it was nowhere NEAR as bad as the commenters would have you believe. I think people just got bent out of shape because they expected Rhodes Scholar/SCOTUS clerks to be infallible.

The list of clarifications appears below. It seems that some students had difficulty following the outline when the professor deviated from the script (which requires paying some attention to what is actually being said, as opposed to playing legal Mad Libs). We also understand that the BarBri folks also don’t see any substantive issue here — just a few students who had trouble following occasional deviations from the outline (perhaps because they weren’t paying close attention).

Constitutional Law Clarifications.jpg

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