You Have No Scars On Your Face, And You Cannot Handle Pressure

It’s two weeks before the bar, so you know what that means; total freaking panic. Ah yeah: dogs and cats living together, pants on the ground, don’t feed the one-man wolfpack after midnight kind of hysteria.

For people who will eventually fail the bar, this is the time that they start choking hard enough to merit a tryout with the U.S. Women’s Soccer team. You know the people out there studying with one hand around their throat. They’re the ones who are still making boneheaded mistakes on evidence questions, but are going to waste an entire day over the next two weeks on commercial paper.

Of course, if you are a first time Bar taker, it might be hard to know if the pressure is getting to you. So here’s a hint, and I’m going to break out the Jeff Foxworthy voice to get it across: if you are threatening to dismember people with plastic cutlery, you might be about to fail the bar…

A person studying for the bar up at Cornell Law who lost her study binder. Perhaps somebody took her binder. Either way, after an undetermined amount of time spent searching for the binder, she sent out this email to the Cornell Law listserv:

Dear person who thought it was acceptable to take my bar outline from the computing cluster during the two minutes I ran to the bathroom,

If you put it back in the next ten minutes, I won’t hunt you down and dismember you using nothing but a plastic fork. If you don’t return it, I will have the registrar’s office look at the camera feed and find out who you are and there will be a reckoning for your douchebaggery.

I’m walking away so you can remain anonymous. TEN MINUTES ARE ON THE CLOCK.

Are any of you old enough to remember the Kevin Costner Robin Hood, where Alan Rickman says that he’s going to cut Robin Hood’s heart out with a spoon “because it’ll hurt more.” This email made me think of that — also because I saw the Harry Potter this weekend — definitely the best eighth movie installment of the summer — and so I was already thinking that Rickman deserves some kind of “Soulless Bastard” lifetime achievement Oscar.

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In any event, Alan Rickman always keeps his cool. This Cornell lady? Not so much:

To the person who never returned my binder,

You should hope you get hit by a bus, because when I find out who you are, you will be praying for the Judas Cradle and other gruesome medieval torture devices, you non-marital child.

Jesus, lady, chill-out. I’m sorry you lost it. If somebody took it from you that was a douchy thing for them to do, but there are worse tragedies.

But this is how it goes around Bar Exam time. In fact, if I was Alan Rickman, I might say:

“In the past it was often the Bar Exam’s pleasure to invade the minds of its victims, creating visions designed to torture them into madness. Only after extracting the last exquisite ounce of agony, only when it had them literally begging for death would it finally… kill them. Used properly, the power of Above the Law will help shield you from access or influence. In these lessons I will attempt to penetrate your mind. You will attempt to resist. Prepare yourself!”

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