Bar Exam Breakdown

Hello. My name is Danielle D'Onfro, and I'm an associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. Today, we're going to begin talking about property, and we're going to spend this lecture just getting set up. Property on the bar just covers real property. This might be a bit smaller than the property class that you probably took as a 1L.

Five Categories

There are 25 real property questions on the bar and these 25 questions are broken into five categories. Each of these five categories has about five questions each. For the bar, it includes roughly five questions from each of the categories. Let's talk about the categories now.

Real Property Ownership

The first one is ownership of real property. This category includes all of the estates, including those fiddly future interests that nobody likes, the rule against perpetuities, co-tenancy, and landlord-tenant law. As a law student, you might have heard that the rule against perpetuities, in its common law form, is not very useful anymore. Unfortunately, the bar loves to test the rule against perpetuities in its common law form. We're going to spend quite a bit of time when we talk through ownership of real property doing rule against perpetuities problems.

Rights in Real Property

The second category is called rights in real property. This category includes things like covenants, easements, fixtures, and zoning. Fixtures, in particular, are a favorite of the bar examiners.

Real Estate Contracts

The third category is real estate contracts. This covers the basics of sale and closing. Topics here include things like the statute of frauds and marketable title, both of which almost always appear on the bar.

Mortgages and Security Devices

The fourth category is mortgages and security devices. Security devices are the subject of at least one and sometimes two whole semesters of coursework in law school. What you need to know for the bar is just a teeny-tiny subset of the law of security devices. You should expect to see lots of questions about who has to pay what on a mortgage, given different ownership arrangements, for example, life estates, co-tenants. This is a great way for the bar to test both your knowledge of the first category, all of those estates, and your knowledge of how mortgages work.

Titles

The final category is called titles. Titles includes adverse possession, transfers by will and by deed. We will have talked about transfers by deed really up in the third category, real estate contracts, but that same information is included down in this fifth category here. The fifth category also includes recording systems and title insurance.

Those are the five categories that appear on the bar.

Test-Taking Tips

Let's talk about some tips for analyzing real property problems.

Read Slowly

The first one is just to read slowly, because if you misread the question, you're unlikely to get it correct. You should know that there are lots of things that sound similar, but are in fact different in real property. This is particularly true of the estates in land. You want to make sure that you're reading slowly and reading carefully.

Left to Right, Step by Step

When you do see a complex grant, I want you to read it from left to right. Sometimes on the bar, because these are longer word problems, even though they're ultimately styled as a multiple-choice question, the grants just contain a lot of words and this can be overwhelming. But you want to start with the true owner and just work through each step that the true owner takes in the order in which he or she takes it. This is almost always going to be presented from left to right, with the first step presented first, then the second step, and so forth. You want to work through all of the steps of a grant in the order in which they occur.

Watch Out for Dates

The third tip I have for you is to watch out for dates. Dates are going to be especially important with problems that are testing your knowledge of recording systems and of priority and security devices. You want to make sure that you have an idea of the timeline of a problem, even if no specific date is given. If you have a grant and then the problem says five years later, make sure that you have an idea of how long the whole problem takes.

Problem with Perpetuities

Then anytime you see a problem that takes longer than 21 years, you need to go back and check and make sure there's not a perpetuities problem. Do not be confused. There are plenty of grants and property problems that are completely valid, even though they go on for longer than 21 years. This is just a tip to help you find violations of the rule against perpetuities that might be lurking in problems that seem like they're about something else.

Statute of Frauds

Finally, I want you to make sure that whenever you have a real property transaction, the problem tells you that the documents are in writing. If you see an oral grant or some oral addendum to a problem that's otherwise in writing, you might be looking at a statute of frauds problem. The property problems on the bar often turn on whether or not they comply with the statute of frauds. This might seem like a contracts concept, and it is, but it also appears over here in real property.

You want to also make sure that you do not get distracted by statute of frauds problems. Statute of frauds problems are often incorrect answers. They're there to distract you from what's really going on in the problem. There will be enough actual statute of frauds problems to keep you on your toes, but you should know that this is a common trick.

With that, let's dive in.