How to Read MEE Quesions

Let's start with how to read what's on the page in front of you. There are two major parts to every MEE question: a fact pattern and a prompt, or usually multiple prompts. The fact pattern is just what it sounds like, the little story that we're going to analyze, like two people entering into what might be a contract, or someone maybe committing a tort, or Congress contemplating a new law that might violate someone's constitutional rights.

This will usually be about a page of text, which is a lot longer and more detailed than the MBE questions, because here we're being asked to write a short essay, not just choose the right answer from a multiple-choice list. And the prompts are the specific issues that we're being asked to address. Is this purported contract enforceable? Did so-and-so commit a battery? Is this new law constitutional?

There will usually be two or three of these prompts, and they'll appear, sometimes numbered, at the bottom of the page, which makes it pretty easy to glance at the question as a whole and see what's the fact pattern and what's the prompt. Now, since we have these two components, we also have a choice about which one to read first, the fact pattern or the prompts.

I suggest that you try it out both ways and see what works best for you. The advantage of reading the prompts first is that it can tell you what to read for. They're a way of kind of getting oriented. Sometimes, not always, MEE prompts are explicit about what the question is. Did John's actions constitute a battery? Do Jane's actions constitute a nuisance?

And since the MEE questions aren't labeled by subject matter, that kind of language can help prime you for whether you're looking at a torts question, or a property question, or whatever. Time-saving is a great thing here because the fact patterns on the MEE are longer than they are for the MBE, and we want to be really intentional and purposeful as we're reading.

Now, I personally prefer to glance at the prompts first, but that's not the only way to do things. The advantage to reading the fact patterns first is that you'll immediately immerse yourself in the question. In many cases, you'll be able to tell right away what the subject matter is, even if you haven't seen the prompt.

If Congress and the president are fighting about something, it's probably constitutional law. If two private individuals are fighting about a business agreement, it's probably contracts or business associations. And while the fact patterns here are longer than for an MBE question, they're not that long, usually about a page. So you should be able to scan through them reasonably quickly.

It's really a matter of personal preference which part of the question to read first. Try it a few times each way so that you have a good sense of what works best for you.

The Fact Pattern

Onto the fact pattern. Now, to the NCBE's credit, the fact patterns on the MEE are sometimes pretty interesting. Just remember that we're reading them with a particular and very narrow goal in mind: to identify the legal issues and the facts we'll need to know in order to address them.

Now, there are a few ways to do that. One thing we'll sometimes see are those magic words that have special meaning in law and which might feel kind of familiar when you see them. Like if the setup starts talking about someone as a public figure, or a particular place as a public forum, that's going to trigger something in your memory. Those are important concepts in First Amendment law.

Or if you're reading a question that refers to someone's quiet enjoyment of their land, you know you're dealing with a property question, maybe something about nuisance or implied covenants and landlord-tenant law.

Now, they won't always be that obvious, of course. It's not always going to be the exact magic words themselves. But especially if you've read the prompts first, you might already be halfway thinking about the relevant concepts, in which case they'll just pop off the page when you get there.

A second thing to look for is weird facts. So let's say you're reading a fact pattern that's largely about Rachel, the landowner, and her efforts to exclude John, who comes onto her land a few times: once to pick berries, once to take a shortcut to work, and once pursued by a bear. What? The bear is totally weird. It feels like it was specifically put into that fact pattern to set up a legal issue.

And sure enough, there's an exception to the trespass rule when a person has privilege, which includes incidents of necessity, like being pursued by a bear. Now, that's obviously a bit of an extreme example. You're probably not going to encounter any bears on the bar. But your legal training will give you a kind of sixth sense for these kinds of things: the contract that's unsigned and thus might raise issues under the statute of frauds, the repeated use of someone else's land that might've created a prescriptive easement.

That kind of stuff will all be floating around in your head as you study, and if your radar tells you that something's off as you're reading the fact pattern, definitely underline or circle it. You'll eventually get into a kind of an unconscious rhythm [which, by the way, will serve you really well as a lawyer] of asking, what is this fact? What's this fact here for? What legal issue is this fact creating?

One question that you're all probably thinking about is whether and how to mark up the fact pattern or to outline as you go. Now, there's no single answer to this question because it really depends a lot on your own preferences for test taking and the kind of question that you're looking at. In most cases, if you're taking the test in a paper format, I think it does help to mark up the page as you're going. Underline, make margin notes, stuff like that.

If you've read the prompts first, and we'll talk about them in just a sec, you might even be able to scribble the number of the prompt next to the relevant text in the fact pattern, like put the number 2 next to the fourth paragraph if you think that text is really important to the second prompt. But if you're a remote test taker and you don't have access to scratch paper, don't sweat it. These fact patterns are not that long. You can always refer back to them if you need to.

One last piece of advice: don't get stuck studying the fact pattern like you're preparing for an exam instead of taking one. You want to read carefully enough that you can keep the basic facts in your mind as you're writing, but you don't want to waste a lot of time memorizing because you can always refer back as you're doing your analysis.

Another reason not to spend too much time trying to figure out the issues is that the prompts will often identify them for you. So let's talk about those.

The Prompts

The prompts are the specific things that the bar examiners will ask you at the end of each fact pattern. These are what we'll be addressing when we write our answers, regardless of whatever other interesting legal questions popped up in the fact pattern.

You can think of this as the questions that the client walks into your office and asks you. You need to answer those questions, not whatever else seems important or interesting. And keep in mind that since we're dealing with essays here, the prompts are going to be more open-ended than what you'll see for the multiple-choice questions on the MBE. These are questions that will require explanation. The answer might even be some form of maybe rather than a simple yes or a no.

Now, usually there will be multiple prompts, maybe two or three, and that means three separate questions, each of which needs to be answered in sufficient detail. They won't necessarily be worth exactly the same amount of points, nor will they necessarily take the same amount of time, but sometimes that's hard to know before you start writing.

And since we only have 30 minutes to work with, again, that's what the MEE allocates to each essay, that means we're basically breaking things down into a series of short-answer questions, and in some ways, that makes things easier. The more prompts there are, the narrower they will be. And by that, I mean that they'll be invoking similar facts or legal principles. So a common setup for the MEE is to have two related but not identical prompts, both coming from one broad area of law.

So you might have two different statutes, both of which raise First Amendment problems, or a statute that raises two different kinds of equal protection issues, or a law that Congress has tried to justify under both its Commerce Clause and its Section 5 powers. Or you might have a tort or criminal law essay that asks you to evaluate the case against each of two or three parties. One might be simple, and the next one a lot more complicated.

The point is that these will all be related but not identical pairs of questions. And that's good to keep in mind because your answers to the prompts probably aren't going to be identical either. They're not looking for you to cut and paste your answer twice. Like this statute violates equal protection as applied to women because XYZ, and also violates equal protection as applied to African-Americans for exactly the same reasons. That law might be unconstitutional twice over, but the reasons will be different.

Sometimes the essay will have a single prompt. Like it'll ask you to answer a single question. If so, it will be a really broad prompt, the kind that you're probably used to answering on law school exams, like, does the court have jurisdiction over Deepak's lawsuit, or does Lauren have an enforceable contract?

Even if there's just a single prompt, you can bet that the graders have been asked to look for multiple issues in your answers, like whether Lauren's contract was entered into with adequate consideration and whether it satisfies the statute of frauds.

Now that we've read everything, we're ready to start mapping out our answers.