The Legal Beat

Congratulations On Passing The Bar
Posted on Tuesday October 12, 2021

Hi. Today, I’ll be every Twitter lawyer who wants to piss on your accomplishment.  Let’s begin.

I passed the bar! I’m a lawyer!

How dare you! You aren’t a lawyer until you are sworn in! You are engaged in the unauthorized practice of law!

I didn’t say I was practicing law. I just passed the bar.

Well, be careful then.  I should also point out that you still don’t know anything.  Seems like you are holding yourself out as a lawyer. Bars don’t look kindly on that.

Don’t you think they’d know the context?

Well, maybe. But I hope not. There’s a reason we have such a barrier to entry.

Well, I know something, I passed the bar!

Not enough.  You just showed you are barely competent. The bar is SO much easier to pass than when I took it.

Well, there are a lot of new barriers. COVID-19, for one.

We had to dress up. Uphill. In the snow. Both ways.

Look, I just want to celebrate.

I don’t think the bar is difficult enough! They need to make it harder.

Why can’t you just be happy for me?

Why? It wasn’t a hard exam. I barely studied for it! In fact, I took it cold and passed the first time!

Uh huh.

I can’t wait to yell at my associates who took time off to study! I had to work full time. Glad they will be back.

I’m just very happy. I studied very hard. I had to take out bar loans. I had to pay a ton of money for bar prep. I agonized. I cried several times.

What until you get into the real world now! You’ll cry!

Okay, enough.

The point, as you can probably guess, is that if someone is celebrating, you need not jump in to destroy their joy. (There are some exceptions, such as pineapple on pizza, someone excited about Adele’s new album dropping, or someone happy about deleting one of the two spaces after a period during editing.)

But you don’t need to be the critic. You know, the one in “History of the World Part I” who pisses on the painting that Sid Caesar’s character just created. Just be happy for a moment for those who overcame this unnecessary obstacle after pouring much time, effort, and money into it. You don’t need to be the person who tells someone who just ran a marathon that it isn’t TWO marathons, or how you ran it faster back in the early 1900s in a suit.

Of course, you shouldn’t jump on those who didn’t pass the bar this time. It was the bar that failed them, not the other way around.

And if you didn’t pass the bar this time around, don’t let someone bring you down. Read this.

LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings here. He is way funnier on social media, he claims. Please follow him on Twitter (@lawprofblawg). Email him at [email protected].

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