Themis Bar Review Hangout - July 2015 Exam Forum

[always_raining]

Can someone explain this Crim Pro MBE question?

[+] Spoiler

On a tip from a criminal informant who indicated that there was "a lot of drug-related" activity going on in a nearby house owned by a woman, a police officer, with no warrant, entered the woman's home and arrested the woman on a charge of criminal drug possession. The officer also seized ten bags of cocaine that were in plain view on the woman's coffee table at the time she was arrested.

Answers I was trying to decide between include: 1. The bags of cocaine constitute evidence seized pursuant to an unlawful arrest and may be suppressed at trial.
2. The woman may not be subsequently prosecuted for the crime of criminal drug possession and if she is, the unlawful arrest will constitute a defense to the crime charged.

I chose 2. The book says an invalid arrest (if done with probable cause) does not mean the person cannot be charged, but seizure of evidence can be suppressed during an invalid arrest. The informant is neither reliable and is not independently verified, so in my mind there is no probable cause to arrest, so she can't be charged either. The right answer is #1. The questions I have seen regarding informant always say they are reliable/able to be verified, and when the question does not say that, then there has been no probable cause. What am I missing?

You're missing that she can still be charged later based on different probable cause, she isn't immune from arrest because she was unlawfully arrested once. Also unlawful arrest isn't a defense to a crime it's just a way to keep out physical evidence.

Makes sense, I should have known from the second part (defense) that the answer was incorrect. Seems like the question was asking about whether she could be charged based on these facts, and since there was no PC (as far as I can tell), then my answer was no. I was thinking the defense part meant that the arrest was illegal bc there was no PC. But I see now that it would have stated that most likely if that's what they meant...

[kjartan]

Why is a practice essay only worth .2%? It's really frustrating...

[kjartan]

Going through the model answer for the third Evidence essay q rn.

[+] Spoiler

Here, the bystander described how the accident occurred.  A car accident is a startling event to most people.  The bystander made his statement to the police immediately after the police arrived, which was three minutes after the accident occurred.  Although D will argue this is too long for a person to still be excited, the court will disagree with him.  This exception will apply.

Wut.

[MrBriggs360]

So today I did a practice essay, a Milestone exam, a full MPT and 7 lectures. It gave me 1.9%. Thanks alot Themis.

[MrBriggs360]

Does anyone have confirmation that your overall percentage completed drops when new tasks become available? If that is true I am NEVER going to be able to finish this course. I hope it is untrue, because I have been deliberately pacing myself to do a specific amount each week to finish on time.

[milesdavisjd]

So today I did a practice essay, a Milestone exam, a full MPT and 7 lectures. It gave me 1.9%. Thanks alot Themis.

I'm in the same boat. 9 lectures, 1 graded essay, 50 MBE Questions, MBE Workshop and IL Distinctions put me at 1.4% Puh-lease. They are trippin.

[MrBriggs360]

I'm more worried about the workload than the actual difficulty of the material at this point. I've been putting in 12 hour days and I don't feel I've been getting rewarded with a good enough percentage bump. I'm going to be really upset if my overall % starts dropping because they open up new tasks, because that really is bullshit.

[milesdavisjd]

So today I did a practice essay, a Milestone exam, a full MPT and 7 lectures. It gave me 1.9%. Thanks alot Themis.

I'm in the same boat. 9 lectures, 1 graded essay, 50 MBE Questions, MBE Workshop and IL Distinctions put me at 1.4% Puh-lease. They are trippin.

And then on Saturday they have me watching ALL 20 of the Evidence lectures. Kill me now.

[sdphill]

So today I did a practice essay, a Milestone exam, a full MPT and 7 lectures. It gave me 1.9%. Thanks alot Themis.

I'm in the same boat. 9 lectures, 1 graded essay, 50 MBE Questions, MBE Workshop and IL Distinctions put me at 1.4% Puh-lease. They are trippin.

And then on Saturday they have me watching ALL 20 of the Evidence lectures. Kill me now.

I was supposed to watch all 20 Evidence lectures today... Only got through 4... Allergies are killing me right now and I can't do much.

I think Themis is trying to kill me. I'm definitely going to work my butt off this weekend to catch up on a few things.

[kgus22]

Just a quick warning to New Yorkers, even though I think this may have already been mentioned. I decided to go through the NY Family Law handout and large outline to compile an "elements spreadsheet" for me to run through and try to memorize and I now realized that Mangold has misstated the elements for a TON of stuff. It seems that she just sort of puts the elements in her own words.

EDIT: Just a quick example to illustrate my point:

In her handout, she says constructive abandonment as a grounds for divorce is where "one spouse forces the other spouse out of the house and that 1. must be willful, continued and unjustified, 2. must include refusal to engage in sexual relations, 3. must last at least one year."

In actuality, she conflated two potential grounds for constructive abandonment. One type of constructive abandonment involves one party forcing the other out of the house. The other type of constructive abandonment is refusal to engage in sexual relations for a period of one year or more. They are two totally different grounds that she conflated. Stuff like this could REALLY screw someone up in an essay.

References.. page 8 of her handout, page 12 of the large outline.

I noticed this!! One weekend I somehow has like 3 family law essays and I noticed her elements were not fully correct and started to get really confused.

[VicariouslySuperior]

So today I did a practice essay, a Milestone exam, a full MPT and 7 lectures. It gave me 1.9%. Thanks alot Themis.

I'm in the same boat. 9 lectures, 1 graded essay, 50 MBE Questions, MBE Workshop and IL Distinctions put me at 1.4% Puh-lease. They are trippin.

And then on Saturday they have me watching ALL 20 of the Evidence lectures. Kill me now.

I was supposed to watch all 20 Evidence lectures today... Only got through 4... Allergies are killing me right now and I can't do much.

I think Themis is trying to kill me. I'm definitely going to work my butt off this weekend to catch up on a few things.

Personally, I didn't find the Evidence lectures that helpful. I watched the first series (1-7) then just went to the outline which I thought was a better use of my time. I still did the assessment questions for the lecture though. The lectures were very dense even though they were only 20 minutes each.

[always_raining]

I'm more worried about the workload than the actual difficulty of the material at this point. I've been putting in 12 hour days and I don't feel I've been getting rewarded with a good enough percentage bump. I'm going to be really upset if my overall % starts dropping because they open up new tasks, because that really is bullshit.

I have never looked at my percentage until this week. We have a "recommended schedule" that I have been following (which you can find next to the "Course Progress" button). There are no extra assignments on the directed study than the recommended schedule; the directed study will change based on how much you have done. So, for example, today I was a little ahead for the lectures and my directed study took that into account but there is no way to say you completed certain tasks until they are assigned (such as "review final outline"). That means sometimes my directed study will be full of a bunch of "review final outline of X subject" but I keep up with the recommended schedule instead. Im a little confused about why it matters what your percentage is - as long as you are following the schedule you will finish.

I am a UBE state though — very possible that other states have much more difficult and heavy workloads. I just dont get putting so much emphasis on the percentage when I can see the schedule in front of me and what needs to be done.

[MrBriggs360]

Just a quick warning to New Yorkers, even though I think this may have already been mentioned. I decided to go through the NY Family Law handout and large outline to compile an "elements spreadsheet" for me to run through and try to memorize and I now realized that Mangold has misstated the elements for a TON of stuff. It seems that she just sort of puts the elements in her own words.

EDIT: Just a quick example to illustrate my point:

In her handout, she says constructive abandonment as a grounds for divorce is where "one spouse forces the other spouse out of the house and that 1. must be willful, continued and unjustified, 2. must include refusal to engage in sexual relations, 3. must last at least one year."

In actuality, she conflated two potential grounds for constructive abandonment. One type of constructive abandonment involves one party forcing the other out of the house. The other type of constructive abandonment is refusal to engage in sexual relations for a period of one year or more. They are two totally different grounds that she conflated. Stuff like this could REALLY screw someone up in an essay.

References.. page 8 of her handout, page 12 of the large outline.

I noticed this!! One weekend I somehow has like 3 family law essays and I noticed her elements were not fully correct and started to get really confused.

I've been compiling a spreadsheet of the elements proper, but it's in terms that ring a bell to me, so it may not be helpful. If you find it helpful, though, I would be happy to send it along when I'm finished or to provide to anyone here, for that matter. This is what it looks like..

http://imgur.com/SRhAAed

[MrBriggs360]

I'm more worried about the workload than the actual difficulty of the material at this point. I've been putting in 12 hour days and I don't feel I've been getting rewarded with a good enough percentage bump. I'm going to be really upset if my overall % starts dropping because they open up new tasks, because that really is bullshit.

I have never looked at my percentage until this week. We have a "recommended schedule" that I have been following (which you can find next to the "Course Progress" button). There are no extra assignments on the directed study than the recommended schedule; the directed study will change based on how much you have done. So, for example, today I was a little ahead for the lectures and my directed study took that into account but there is no way to say you completed certain tasks until they are assigned (such as "review final outline"). That means sometimes my directed study will be full of a bunch of "review final outline of X subject" but I keep up with the recommended schedule instead. Im a little confused about why it matters what your percentage is - as long as you are following the schedule you will finish.

I am a UBE state though — very possible that other states have much more difficult and heavy workloads. I just dont get putting so much emphasis on the percentage when I can see the schedule in front of me and what needs to be done.

Okay, so basically my position is that I scheduled myself 8 weeks to devote to bar prep with limited work. So I follow the course percentage to ensure that I complete exactly 12.5% each week, to make sure I hit 100% by July 28. So what I'm saying is if I hit 37.5% by the end of the week, which I need to do to ensure that I'm on my correct pace, if suddenly they unlock a new assignment and my overall percentage drops to 35% on monday morning, that means that I have to make up an additional 2.5% that week that I didn't know existed. So I'm just scared of the fact that that I might have to suddenly wedge 10 days of work into 7 days when I'm already basically doing 8 days of work in 7 days as it is.

[texlaw]

Heard this song for the first time today. Couldn't be more fitting.

"This Summer's Gonna Hurt Like a Motherf--ker."

[always_raining]

I'm more worried about the workload than the actual difficulty of the material at this point. I've been putting in 12 hour days and I don't feel I've been getting rewarded with a good enough percentage bump. I'm going to be really upset if my overall % starts dropping because they open up new tasks, because that really is bullshit.

I have never looked at my percentage until this week. We have a "recommended schedule" that I have been following (which you can find next to the "Course Progress" button). There are no extra assignments on the directed study than the recommended schedule; the directed study will change based on how much you have done. So, for example, today I was a little ahead for the lectures and my directed study took that into account but there is no way to say you completed certain tasks until they are assigned (such as "review final outline"). That means sometimes my directed study will be full of a bunch of "review final outline of X subject" but I keep up with the recommended schedule instead. Im a little confused about why it matters what your percentage is - as long as you are following the schedule you will finish.

I am a UBE state though — very possible that other states have much more difficult and heavy workloads. I just dont get putting so much emphasis on the percentage when I can see the schedule in front of me and what needs to be done.

Okay, so basically my position is that I scheduled myself 8 weeks to devote to bar prep with limited work. So I follow the course percentage to ensure that I complete exactly 12.5% each week, to make sure I hit 100% by July 28. So what I'm saying is if I hit 37.5% by the end of the week, which I need to do to ensure that I'm on my correct pace, if suddenly they unlock a new assignment and my overall percentage drops to 35% on monday morning, that means that I have to make up an additional 2.5% that week that I didn't know existed. So I'm just scared of the fact that that I might have to suddenly wedge 10 days of work into 7 days when I'm already basically doing 8 days of work in 7 days as it is.

Ah, I think I understand where you're coming from. This makes more sense if you are using the percentage rather than the schedule.

I always am scheduled for the same percentage, though the amount of work varies. I believe what is happening is that the percentage is based purely off mathematics (how many days you have divided by the percentage of work you have left), but the schedule does not add up to that (because the Sunday and Monday - at least for me - have lighter work loads). So perhaps the schedule counts assignments for less (or more) when you have more (or less) work scheduled for the day. If the program believes that 1.5% = your workload for the day, then certain assignments will be worth less one day than the next day. For example, yesterday an essay might be worth 1% because you don't have much scheduled, but tomorrow it might be worth .2% because you have a lot scheduled. And if you don't get everything finished, from what I can tell, the assignments get redistributed throughout the entire schedule, but your percentage changes solely based on your overall work left and not on daily work. If you finish your 1.5% of assignments for one day, you might actually be on a "light" day, meaning that you haven't actually done 1.5% of the entire course that day, but the course sees a "finished day" as 1.5%.

TLDR; The percentage is not evenly distributed because the schedule does not have you doing the same amount of work every day. It simply describes any amount of work you have for the day as a specific percentage but that does not appear to correlate to the actual assignments.

Disclaimer: this is based off a personal understanding.

[Lawbro]

I was assigned 7 things today lol. If I get through half of them I'll be happy

[sd5289]

Did you do the graded essay early???

No. I had one Crim Law / Crim Pro graded essay last week, and today it's Crim Pro / Evidence (I'm taking only NY). I don't think they even open the graded essays until the day they are "due" anyway.

Re. workload: um, yeah. Today I have a measly 1.3% scheduled, yet tomorrow it's scheduled me for 6 things including ALL of the Civ Pro lectures. Yeah, no Themis. We need to work on spreading these out a bit more...plus I thought the weekends were mainly supposed to be for "review" and getting ready for things like the Milestone exam on Monday.

[kgus22]

Just a quick warning to New Yorkers, even though I think this may have already been mentioned. I decided to go through the NY Family Law handout and large outline to compile an "elements spreadsheet" for me to run through and try to memorize and I now realized that Mangold has misstated the elements for a TON of stuff. It seems that she just sort of puts the elements in her own words.

EDIT: Just a quick example to illustrate my point:

In her handout, she says constructive abandonment as a grounds for divorce is where "one spouse forces the other spouse out of the house and that 1. must be willful, continued and unjustified, 2. must include refusal to engage in sexual relations, 3. must last at least one year."

In actuality, she conflated two potential grounds for constructive abandonment. One type of constructive abandonment involves one party forcing the other out of the house. The other type of constructive abandonment is refusal to engage in sexual relations for a period of one year or more. They are two totally different grounds that she conflated. Stuff like this could REALLY screw someone up in an essay.

References.. page 8 of her handout, page 12 of the large outline.

I noticed this!! One weekend I somehow has like 3 family law essays and I noticed her elements were not fully correct and started to get really confused.

I've been compiling a spreadsheet of the elements proper, but it's in terms that ring a bell to me, so it may not be helpful. If you find it helpful, though, I would be happy to send it along when I'm finished or to provide to anyone here, for that matter. This is what it looks like..

http://imgur.com/SRhAAed

Yea, that would be great if you could send it along!

[MrBriggs360]

I think I realized why it's jamming me up with so many tasks. I looked at the recommended study schedule and compared it to the dynamic schedule and it's pretty much trying to have me entirely 100% caught up to the course by July 18th. Remember, I spread this over 8 weeks as opposed to 9 1/2. So because it's trying to have me caught up by July 18th rather than me meet everyone at the finish line, it's killing me with tasks right now.

[smalogna]

Did you do the graded essay early???

No. I had one Crim Law / Crim Pro graded essay last week, and today it's Crim Pro / Evidence (I'm taking only NY). I don't think they even open the graded essays until the day they are "due" anyway.

Re. workload: um, yeah. Today I have a measly 1.3% scheduled, yet tomorrow it's scheduled me for 6 things including ALL of the Civ Pro lectures. Yeah, no Themis. We need to work on spreading these out a bit more...plus I thought the weekends were mainly supposed to be for "review" and getting ready for things like the Milestone exam on Monday.

That explains it. I'm taking MA as well and was assigned a MA Con law essay last Friday

[milesdavisjd]

I think I realized why it's jamming me up with so many tasks. I looked at the recommended study schedule and compared it to the dynamic schedule and it's pretty much trying to have me entirely 100% caught up to the course by July 18th. Remember, I spread this over 8 weeks as opposed to 9 1/2. So because it's trying to have me caught up by July 18th rather than me meet everyone at the finish line, it's killing me with tasks right now.

Well... at least you'll be ready for the simulated MBE? I'm trying not the let that freak me out, but that's my endgame... to have done my first pass of all of the outlines and lectures before the simulated test in the beginning of July and then "polish" afterwards.

[sd5289]

Wow, themis is really into the "depraved heart" murder hypos right now...

[GULCPerson]

Does anyone have confirmation that your overall percentage completed drops when new tasks become available? If that is true I am NEVER going to be able to finish this course. I hope it is untrue, because I have been deliberately pacing myself to do a specific amount each week to finish on time.

What makes you think the overall % works this way? I have no idea if it does or doesn't, I guess, but it would be insanely counterintuitive to have an "overall progress" number that doesn't account for a significant number of delayed-release assignments (or frankly, that could ever decrease, for any reason).

[texlaw]

Does anyone have confirmation that your overall percentage completed drops when new tasks become available? If that is true I am NEVER going to be able to finish this course. I hope it is untrue, because I have been deliberately pacing myself to do a specific amount each week to finish on time.

What makes you think the overall % works this way? I have no idea if it does or doesn't, I guess, but it would be insanely counterintuitive to have an "overall progress" number that doesn't account for a significant number of delayed-release assignments (or frankly, that could ever decrease, for any reason).

Well, a new graded essay opened up today, and I didn't see my overall percentage go down.