The first
On the way to Rockwell, I was on the verge of mouthing codal provisions inside the train, because they seemed to be swirling, disorderly, inside my head. It’s a few minutes to 11, and the constitutional law 1 exam will begin in about an hour.
We’ve been told to come in an hour early because the law school assigns us to a different room, with a designated seat laid out in a neat seat plan, for every exam. This is the first examination of the midterm week. And our first midterm. Our first major exam in the law school.
I have long accepted the fact that you can never be fully prepared for an exam (or anything, really). Our brain is a finite space. Inasmuch as I’d like to squeeze in the entire inner workings of Congress inside it, it can’t be done.
Once I arrived on campus, I dashed to the third floor. It was already a little past 11 a.m., and the place was already swarming with 1Ls eager–or dreading–to take the exam. Our assigned room and seats are posted at the bulletin board, for everyone to see. So much for data privacy (even our middle names were revealed)!
Most were seated across the couches, but I assume a lot were still in the library. One can easily see 1Ls because they were either holding Fr. Bernas’s book, Mickey’s Consti Companion, or the self-bound reviewer or a copy of previous years’ Ateneo Blue Notes. Some had index cards, and some created their own neat notes in Google Docs.
Some 1A folks were lounging at the Titanic from across Room 313. They were discussing, and asking each other last-minute tidbits they may have inadvertently skipped. Consti, in particular, required a stronger appreciation of case law. Codal alone in Consti will not suffice, because … the Supreme Court said so.
Owing to a slew of “judge-made laws,” the Philippines’s legal system treats the gods of Padre Faura as the bedrock of its laws. This seemingly dangerous phenomenon is most apparent in Consti–a document deliberately made vague to stand the test of time is the most susceptible for judicial review. So for the Consti midterm, we have to read from Magallona v. Ermita up to Lambino v. COMELEC (and a little under 200 cases in between them).
It’s a different learning style for Persons and Family Law, and Criminal Law 1, though. The both require a heavy appreciation of the codal provisions, with the former relying on doctrines laid by landmark cases (like Tan-Andal v. Andal and Republic v. Manalo) and the latter requiring a nuanced understanding of LB Reyes’s commentary on the Revised Penal Code. (Of course, I am kidding. You need to eat the Civil Code and Reyes just to barely pass the exam.)
In the end, results matter. While I have serious, personal reservations about how teaching law hasn’t changed since time immemorial (just because “it works” and “produces results”), that isn’t yet a concern of a lowly 1L like me. Results matter because those are litmus tests of my fitness to continue in this four-year program. Let’s leave it at that, for now.
The 10-day midterm examination allowed me to learn more about myself rather than the law itself. The three-week review schedule I took allowed me to know that staying late in the library works, cramming in between classes is fruitless, reading the cases in the originals and making your own digest is helpful for retention, annotating the book and codals helps, and studying with the body and mind exhausted never works.
As Dean Vannie told us, the midterm is easy because there’s less stuff to study, but it’s negated by the fact that this is our first law school exam. Revising for the exam could only do so much. You can never train your nerves enough.
And so here’s an important lesson I learned this hell week: Law school is listening to your body and knowing the most optimal way, place, and time to learn. Unlike the body of laws, our physical body is finite and limited. It’s impossible to master every provision or doctrine all at the same level. It’s inevitable that there will always be a trade-off between breadth and depth.
The law school exam is, in a way, always a game of chance, wishing that the ones you’ve mastered enough show up in the test. In the end, it always requires putting the work into it. There can be no shortcuts.