Does anyone here happen to be an expert in property law?

[John Dule]

This is a longshot, but I'm currently studying for the bar exam and I've realized I had an absolutely useless property course in my 1L year. I know literally nothing about future interests, mortgages, deeds, race/notice statutes, executory interests, the Rule Against Perpetuities, defeasible fees generally, deed delivery, fixtures, profits, or equitable servitudes/covenants. For whatever reason, my 1L property class was almost entirely focused on landlord/tenant law, nuisance, and easements.

I am trying my best to learn literally everything there is to know about property law in the next week. Does this crap make sense to any of our in-house lawyers here on Atlas? I know this is mostly bar BS that you never use in practice, but please let me know if anyone's got a handle on this and could answer some questions. Much obliged.

[DaleCooper]

I'm a self-proclaimed expert on it.

[Ancestral Republican]

Watch this.

Thank me later.

[Fmr. Pres. Duke]

Property law was my least favorite class in LS. I never understood rules against perpetuities but was fine with some of the other things. I stumbled through it on the bar exam but the question they asked wasn't particularly hard. Now I remember barely any of it.

[Catholics vs. Convicts]

I think I did well on the property portion of the bar, but Property Law was somehow one of my worst grades in law school. I’d love to be as much of a resource as possible, on your bar studying journey, but I’m not sure if I’d be able to be much more helpful than barbri. Please feel free to reach out with any questions, but also trust your bar studying resources as they do really know what you will be responsible for knowing.

Also, you are not alone in feeling like 1L classes did not prepare you for the bar exam. I recall studying for the bar was a lot of learning things for the first time. Law school, the bar exam, and actually practicing law have so very little to do with each other it’s silly. That is the challenge us lawyers have been blessed with.

Once again, I’m happy to try to help as much as I can. I also imagine there have to be at least a handful of other attorneys here who are rockstars and should be able to help too.

[John Dule]

I think I did well on the property portion of the bar, but Property Law was somehow one of my worst grades in law school. I’d love to be as much of a resource as possible, on your bar studying journey, but I’m not sure if I’d be able to be much more helpful than barbri. Please feel free to reach out with any questions, but also trust your bar studying resources as they do really know what you will be responsible for knowing.

Also, you are not alone in feeling like 1L classes did not prepare you for the bar exam. I recall studying for the bar was a lot of learning things for the first time. Law school, the bar exam, and actually practicing law have so very little to do with each other it’s silly. That is the challenge us lawyers have been blessed with.

Once again, I’m happy to try to help as much as I can. I also imagine there have to be at least a handful of other attorneys here who are rockstars and should be able to help too.

I guess just as a preliminary question, I'd like to know how you went about memorizing the sheer volume of crap you need to know for this exam. I haven't really been exercising my memorization abilities in recent years-- most of my law school exams are open-note, and I generally devote my energies to outlining, not memorization.

My only strategy for memorization right now is making about 500 flashcards, as well as my usual memes:

[gerritcole]

Try anki flashcards, worked for a ton of classmates

[dead0man]

Law school, the bar exam, and actually practicing law have so very little to do with each other it’s silly. That is the challenge us lawyers have been blessed with.

this kind of thing is not unique to lawyers, it's probably a problem in all fields to one degree or another.  I spent weeks learning Boolean Algebra 30 years ago, have never used it once, don't even know what it is, why I was taught it or even how to spell it (I had to look it up).

[Damocles]

I don't know this sort of stuff directly. However, my oldest brother is a big-time property manager in New York City responsible for a portfolio of something like 20-25 buildings. I can ask him. Do you have any specific questions?

[Meclazine for Israel]

Good luck.

For memory based exams, I used to write stuff out by hand.

[Catholics vs. Convicts]

For the MBE, I "memorized" the law by just churning through as many practice questions as I could, of course after going through the primer lessons on the given subject. You may feel like you have to have your outline or flash cards memorized on every subject, but I think you will find that going through hundreds and hundreds of practice questions, including a thorough analysis of why each multiple choice answer is either right or wrong, you will develop a strong proficiency in understanding how to find the important facts in a question, what element of the law that fact taps into, and identifying red herring facts or elements of the law that are almost never right. It may feel intimidating starting your practice questions and getting so many wrong to start, but if you have a resource like barbri with 1000s of practice questions, just start diving in and answering a bunch of questions every day. You will really start to identify the predictable patterns the MBE questions follow, and you will have memorized the most important topics and be able to say, "oh this is an adverse possession question, and with these questions they always try to trip you up this way, but I know this is the most important fact in this fact pattern." Bottom line, its more important to know how to break down an MBE question in each of the major subjects rather than have 100% of the law memorized.

With the essays, I'm sure you will hear this from other sources, but it is not make or break where you have to have every aspect of the law memorized. Now, I'll add the caveat that I know California has a tough, competitive bar exam, so maybe the Bar's standard is very high there. But in my experience, the #1 priority is you have to know how to apply a rule to the fact pattern and reach a conclusion. I know for a fact that on multiple essay questions when I took the bar in Illinois, I did not know the actual rule. So I made up a rule. You will get dinged some points for having the wrong rule, but if you have a very well thought out and articulated analysis of how your made up rule applies to the facts of the question, you will likely be able to get a passing grade on the question. Now, obviously, you will want to know more applicable rules than ones you make up in your essays. But I think some of that will come from your MBE studying on those main subjects. Another tip of how you can try to game the system is to look at bar exam essay frequency charts to look for a pattern and try to identify which subjects you are likely to be tested on. Then you can prioritize those subjects.

When I took the bar exam, I saw that Illinois had not asked a question on Federal Income Tax in 10+ years, even though it was a "tested subject". So I just didn't bother memorizing every single aspect of the subject. Looking at the California recently tested subjects chart, (https://jdadvising.com/california-bar-exam-essay-frequency-chart/), it may be possible to assume you don't have to waste your time on Agency and partnership, wills, or trusts. Now that is a risk for sure, but I think prioritizing your studying time is likely necessary, and playing that game can help you know what you may want to prioritize.

Bottom line on the essays, if you get really, really, really good at writing an essay answer, you should be able to survive not knowing the rule on a few of the questions. So just make sure you do what you can to know how to properly write an essay answer.

I'm sorry if this isn't the advice you were looking for. It is a very daunting task, and you should of course strive to know or "memorize" as much of the law as you can. But remember that the bar exam is more about testing a candidate's ability to identify, analyze, reason, and come to a conclusion, rather than grading people on whether they have total recall on every subject of the law. Practice, practice, practice on the MBE questions and essays, and the knowledge of the rules will start to sink in as well.

[Smash255]

I'm a Closing Manager for a Mortgage company so deal with the Residential Mortgage and Title side of things.  With that said, not a lawyer, and the area I have a background in only covers a sliver of property law in general.

[Badger]

Surely there's plenty of good bar prep courses/materials out there? I wouldn't go asking people who actually no stuff about property law because, as counterintuitive as it might be, that's really not what you need to know for the bar exam.