All Things Profane and Sacred

Today I have "off" from bar study (which means I don't have to go in to school and jam down notes frantically with my poor weak computer hands, but do have a shit load of practice problems). This week we worked on Criminal Law, which is a funny bar topic because the examiners test on common law crimes.

The deal with common law crimes is this: When we separated from England, the whole country was a blank slate, and thus had no law of its own. So we just imported the law of England as it was in the late 1700s, and this became our "common law." Today, in the criminal area, every state has statutes that fix up this anachronistic law with all sorts of spiffy stuff, so no state follows common law crimes. Since every state has different criminal law, the bar examiners (I'm starting to picture them as looking like the bad guys from Krypton in Superman, and oh, how I'd love to send them out into space, trapped into that groovy squarish/diamondish thing) test on common law. So as I do these problems, I start to feel like the purpose of this portion of the exam is to punish you for actually knowing anything about criminal law as it exists today. And I mutter crankily. And picture flinging these folks out into space jail, trapped in the 2nd dimension.