The bar exam

THE BAR EXAM

It was the summer of 1971. For a semester, I had been studying to prepare for the bar exam. Three months of classes followed by three months of intensive studying with three classmates. Six subjects. Six written exams over three days; one in the morning, one in the afternoon. It was the last weekend before the exam. My wife Hélène and I went to a restaurant on Saturday night. I felt at my best. I had promised myself not to open a book on Sunday. I knew everything there was to know. Nothing I could do at the last minute would change anything in my performance one day later except feed my anxiety. I still remember, as if it were yesterday, how good I felt that night. I should have been nervous, worried, irritable. I still can’t believe my detachment and calm confidence during that short period when my fate was being decided.

So I resisted. I resisted until late Sunday afternoon. That Sunday, just before

There was a book that contained hundreds of questions and answers from exams held over the past fifty years. Every student had a copy of this book and used it to prepare better. I had decided to open it randomly, blindly, and let God decide where my finger would land on one of the pages. I had done this dozens of times. In fact, I could answer all the questions in that collection. I couldn’t fail this test, and yet, against all logic, I felt an irresistible urge to take it one last time. Just to prove to myself that everything would go smoothly the next day. More like a whim, a frivolity, or a quirk.

The compilation was over four hundred pages long. I opened the manual. My eyes were closed. I placed my finger somewhere—I can’t remember if it was on the left or right page. No matter. The question was number 363 and five lines long. I read it quickly, expecting an immediate answer and the development it needed. Then I read it again. Once. Twice. It was useless. The words I was reading could have been written in a foreign language. No familiarity with the topic. My mind was a blank slate.

Suddenly, I felt sick. A chill ran down my spine. Sweat beaded on my forehead. I thought: suppose this very question appears on the exam tomorrow. The first one your eyes land on, and you’re there, hoping from the very first words for the comfort that only prior familiarity with the answer can bring. But what you see instead freezes you with dread. A jumble of words whose meaning escapes you, a wording that might as well have been printed in Sanskrit for all the understanding it provided. Five questions. Twenty points assigned to each. And now this cruel twist of fate. It wasn’t even the start of the exam and I was already facing a twenty percent handicap. Then I told myself: all is not lost. You can still do it. After all, they give you twenty-four minutes per question for a reason, didn’t they?

It’s time to get to work.

And that’s what I did. I opened the book that compiled all the laws applying to contracts. The most important one had 1,131 articles. The answer was in there, hidden somewhere in that mess of legislation, ordinances, statutes, decrees, regulations, and protocols, with decades' worth of amendments, revisions, corrections, tweaks, adjustments—not to mention repetitions and many inconsistencies. No matter. My three years in law school, the three months spent at bar school, and the months I had just devoted to preparing for this exam had to count for something. If the answer was in there—and it was—I would find it easily, as I had done hundreds of times, right?

Fifteen minutes passed. Then thirty. Nothing. I knew at that moment that I should have given up on the question and moved on. But I couldn’t accept failure. A part of me preferred to risk going down with the ship than surrender to an enemy smirking at me. I had never felt so miserable in my life. All the comfort I had anticipated from a quick resolution had been replaced by a chilling certainty of impending disaster. When Hélène found me in that state, she exclaimed, “Are you sick? You look like a ghost.”

At that point, it wouldn’t have taken much for me to break down crying like a child. The experience had completely drained me, leaving me alone with my despair. Full capitulation came when I finally resigned myself to opening the solution key. The answer to question 363 struck me by its banality. It was article 755, and the reason I had missed it was because the damn paragraph started at the bottom of page 289 and continued at the very top of the next page. Easy to miss if you weren’t careful. Suddenly, the bar exam didn’t seem like fun anymore. That night, I went to bed hating myself for what I had done. I was beaten, left for dead on the battlefield, without having fired a single shot.

My mood hadn’t changed much by morning, even though Hélène had done her best to lift my spirits—and she was good at that, believe me. I got in my car and drove to the hotel where the event was being held. I joined other candidates waiting to have their competence tested. I was handed a brown envelope. A folding table awaited me with my name on it. I sat down. I opened the envelope and pulled out the contents, placing the evam on the table in front of me, refraining from looking at it. I positioned the pencil and the notebook for writing my answers on the table, taking manic care to adjust the angle so that the setup would look just right to the proctor pacing the aisles. As if that ritual meant anything. Then I dared a first glance. Never before had I been so scared as I was that morning. My heart pounded as if I had run all the way there.

Now, guess what happened.

As soon as my lips formed the first words of the question appearing at the top of the page under my disbelieving eyes, my mind instantly recognized question 363—the very one that had caused me so much trouble at home the day before. It had to be a sign from above. Nothing short of a miracle: luck in its purest, rawest, most authentic and undeniable form. The very essence of good fortune. Its ultimate definition. It would be hard to find a better story to illustrate its effects here on Earth. Even better than winning a million in the lottery—because this was a moment that would define the rest of my life, an episode that would help shape the man I was to become.