Lowering the Bar

It has been nearly a month since the bar exam. I am happy to report that, while my elbow still occasionally clicks, my fists have begun to unclench and I don't jump at loud noises anymore.

The results do not come in until sometime in November, which is fine. A stay of execution is always appreciated.

However, I do have to fill out the bar application for the State of New York, so that the Board of Bar Overseers becomes satisfied that I possess a good, upstanding, and moral character and deems me acceptable enough to be an attorney.

See, New York is smart about this. Massachusetts made us do the whole song and dance -- questionnaires, letters of recommendation, statements of disclosure, criminal records -- before we took the bar exam.

New York, however, holds off. They don't require you to document your life until after the exam. This is nice, because if for any reason you didn't take the exam, quit during the middle of BarBri, had a nervous breakdown, or ran screaming out of the exam room, at least you didn't have to bother the Ithaca Police Department to ask them to furnish you with copies of an old arrest report. Which can be awkward. Or so I hear.

In any event, I now also have to fill out the New York application, which means I have to get letters of recommendation stating that I am a good and decent person and would not set anyone on fire unless I really had to. I already did it once (got people to write a letter, not set someone on fire. The latter happened more than once), but I hate to have to ask people to lie twice.

Or maybe I don't need to. Somehow I feel like I should get new recommendations. What follows is an excerpt of a letter from a good friend to the Massachusetts bar:

Over [four years], he has become what you might call a "colleague in beverage consumption" to me. We have passed many a night seeking to foster relationships among certain demographic groups of interest (a.k.a. chasing tail), and occasionally succeeded in doing so. In this endeavor he has conducted himself with utmost professionalism and honesty. Except for that time he convinced a girl he was an astronaut. But other than that, total honesty. Even on the occasions that our tendency to imbibe without limit has caused him to become "naturally indisposed," he has maintained his composure - only very seldom lighting objects or people on fire, and never without good reason. And on the rare occasion that he threatens to throw someone off the roof of a building, he does so with the caveat that they are presumed innocent until proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be "killing the buzz." In his capacity as a lawyer, I would only say that were I to end up in a jail cell, I could imagine worse people to have for my legal defense. That is, assuming he was not also in said jail cell.

Accurate? Of course. The unvarnished truth? Mostly. What the bar needs to hear? Probably not.

So in the unlikely case that anyone out there has the opposite impression of me and would like to convey that opinion to the people who evaluate New York lawyers, I would be happy to hear from you.

Or if you have no compulsions about lying, misleading, obfuscating, or otherwise adjusting the truth, I'd love to hear from you too.

Perhaps we can go into business together.