Blog | Themis Bar Review

After ten years in the bar prep industry, Themis remains the only company to publish comprehensive, transparent, and trustworthy pass-rate data. If you have yet to check out our pass-rate information, you can find the numbers here. Themis calculates pass rates because we value transparency and student success, and to prove to students that our methodology works.  In this post, we want to give you a chance to understand how we get the data for our pass rates and what that data means.

Inviting strange children to your home after dark to feed them potential allergens and choking hazards? Displaying fake corpses and images of the occult? Hacking into giant gourds with huge, unsharpened kitchen knives, in close proximity to friends and loved ones?  It’s not surprising that Halloween has given rise to some pretty sensational lawsuits spanning all areas of the law. From products liability (who knew it would be a bad idea to light a cigarette when dressed as a cotton-ball-covered sheep?)¹ to freedom of expression (shout out to the Seventh Circuit for protecting your right to talk smack about your neighbors via fake tombstone)².  From the mundanity of premises liability (if you break your nose fleeing a haunted house right into a cinderblock wall, you’re on your own)³ to intellectual property (banana costume buyer, beware) ⁴.

Since tricks and treats have inspired a plethora of lawsuits, it follows that lawsuits can inspire some truly great Halloween costumes.  We know you can do better than stapling some old case files to your oldest gray flannel and calling it a “lawsuit.”  See below for some ideas sure to impress your friends.

Go with an oldie but a goodie (or should that be a Goody?).  The Salem Witch Trials give rise to too many costumes to list here.  Goody Proctor.  Judge Hathorne. Giles Corey and his “more weight”. Even Old Scratch himself.  Bonus points if you can figure out how to dress as ergot poisoning.

Celebrate the popularization of American courtroom drama:  find a group of friends, two of whom can go as legal giants Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryant, one of whom can go as high school teacher John T. Scopes (men simply do NOT wear enough straw hats these days—this could be your excuse to buy one), and any number of whom can go as a monkey, or really any other hominid, in the Scopes Monkey Trial, which was the first American legal trial to be broadcast on the radio. H.L.

Whether you are at the top of your class or just scraping by, law school has a unique way of making you feel completely inadequate and insecure. These feelings are often unfamiliar because you excelled to get into law school in the first place. Everyone reaches their breaking point, those times when stress and anxiety fill you with the impending fear of not being good enough.

It’s a new school year and the semester is now in full swing. You survived a summer job or internship and are getting back to basics: reading cases, trying to avoid getting called on in class, and wondering how you’ll make it out of law school alive. As you navigate through this semester and beyond, it’s important to think about what you want to accomplish this year. What do you hope to achieve? What plans are you making for the future?