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About Us
Nadine Heitz
I first got the idea for BarIssues.com as a law student studying for law school exams and planning ahead for the California Bar Exam. Seeing the number of legal issues and rules in each course adding up, I realized there were potentially thousands of issues that could be tested on the bar exam. I wanted to make the best use of our study time, so I searched for a resource showing which issues in each subject were tested most often on the essay portion of the exam. To my surprise, I found that no such data existed! So I decided to create my own database by analyzing all essays and selected answers on the California Bar Exam beginning with July 2001, when they first became available on the State Bar website.
This was a big undertaking, but the database became an important study tool which I updated after every new release of bar exam essays. While using it as a supplemental resource for law school exams, I decided to separate each essay question into its own PDF file for quick and easy reference - and wow did that help! As the bar exam approached, with years of data in front of me, I could easily see where to spend the bulk of our efforts: studying the most frequently tested issues. Not only that, but I could quickly find bar-passing answers for any tested issue.
Knowing how helpful the database had been, I realized it could be shared with other law students and bar candidates, and as a resource for law professors and bar exam tutors. This website became my next goal, and a year later, BarIssues.com was born.
I'm proud to offer the only existing in-depth database of all legal issues tested on California Bar Exam essays since 2001, so bar candidates can focus on the issues that count!
Nadine Heitz, Founder
Subscribers' Comments:
I've used BarIssues.com to decide which flashcards to focus on for each subject, since by pulling up a listing of all the issues for each subject, it’s easy to see which rules & definitions come up the most. My "top 25" flashcards in each subject were all derived from the top 25 issues.
I felt OVERWHELMED as I began my bar prep thinking that I had to know how to IRAC every single legal issue for 15 subjects, but with BarIssues.com I could easily see the most commonly tested issues on the Bar, and better yet - see how they were written over and over again for a pass.
A great way to get concise, short rule statements is to look at how bar candidates who actually passed the bar exam wrote up their rules. I used BarIssues.com to see how these bar candidates did it and formulated my flashcards from these.
When I am studying a particular subject, BarIssues.com makes it so easy to find all of the model answer exams from that subject - I am checking off all of the ones that I have reviewed and my goal will be to practice writing out or issue spotting all of them!
If an issue came up only once on the Bar Exam in the last twelve years, then why should I study that issue as much as one that has come up ten times in the last twelve years? I feel much more confident knowing what to expect on the essays by using BarIssues.com.
We welcome your feedback. Drop us a note to tell us what you like best about BarIssues.com
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