ProfessorTommy.Tips

April 1 is supposed to be lighthearted. It's the one day of the year when people expect practical jokes, harmless pranks, and the occasional attempt to fool a friend, classmate, or coworker. But if you're studying for the bar exam, today also presents a useful reminder that a prank can raise serious legal issues. On the bar exam, the label “joke” doesn't control. The real question is whether the facts satisfy the elements of a tort or crime. A good way to think about April Fo

When news broke yesterday that Tiger Woods was involved in a rollover crash in Florida—with reports of breathalyzer testing and refusal to submit to additional testing—it immediately raised a pair of issues that can show up on the bar exam. Before we go any further, a quick disclaimer (because that’s what we do here): I’m not weighing in on what happened, whether any testing (or refusal) was justified, or how this situation should be resolved. I’m using the headline as a cle

If you've been watching sports on television lately, you may have seen the Eli Lilly commercial centered on the scientific method . It's a memorable ad because it presents progress as a process rather than a single moment. The commercial focuses on observing, questioning, testing, analyzing, and then beginning again. Its core message is simple: Sometimes progress requires you to start over. That idea is especially useful in bar preparation. One of the biggest mistakes student

Well, that didn’t take long. Just hours after I posted about the "Final 7” jurisdictions that had yet to decide whether to adopt the NextGen bar exam, the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued an order adopting the Legacy Uniform Bar Examination beginning in July 2026, with a transition to the NextGen UBE in July 2028. So, yes, my earlier post (" South Carolina Is In, So What About the Final 7 ") aged quickly. But in another sense, it aged pretty well. Wisconsin was one of the juri

South Carolina is officially in. With its announcement yesterday that it will begin administering the NextGen UBE in July 2028, South Carolina becomes the 49th jurisdiction to have already committed to the new exam. That leaves just seven jurisdictions still on the sidelines. And that’s really the story now. This is no longer about whether the NextGen UBE will become the dominant bar exam. It already has. The question now is what these remaining jurisdictions are signaling