ProfessorTommy.tips

You didn’t really think I’d let the biggest pop-culture event of the past week go silent, did you?

What law students can learn from Taylor Swift's "The Life of a Showgirl": https://bit.ly/42v0Jzl

A Football Metaphor from Two Recent Unfortunate Plays: Law School Is the Drive, the Bar Exam Is the End Zone You’ve seen it: A wide receiver or running back breaks free, the crowd roars, and the touchdown is all but certain. But instead of finishing the play, the player drops the football just before crossing the goal line. What should have been six points turns into a heartbreaking touchback.In Jay Busb...

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Fat Bear Week and the Law of Wild Animals It’s Fat Bear Week! Each fall, Katmai National Park in Alaska celebrates the massive brown bears who spend their summer fishing at Brooks River, bulking up for the long hibernation ahead. The park even sets up a tournament-style bracket where bears are matched against each other, and fans vote onl...

A Winning Percentage in Baseball … and on the Bar Exam The MLB regular season has just two weeks left before the postseason begins, and one number jumps out to me: The Milwaukee Brewers are currently leading the league with about a .600 winning percentage. (Specifically, the Brewers are currently 91-59 for a 0.607 winning percentage.)That means they’r...

International Dot Day: Overcoming the Fear of the Blank Page September 15 is International Dot Day, inspired by Peter H. Reynolds’ children’s book, The Dot. In the story, Vashti stares at a blank sheet of paper, convinced she can’t draw. With a gentle nudge from her teacher, she makes a single dot. That small start turns into creativity, confidence, and...

National Peanut(s) Day: Bar Prep Lessons from the Gang Today, September 13, is officially National Peanut Day—a celebration of the nut that finds its way into ballpark snacks, trail mix, and peanut butter sandwiches. But I’d rather give a nod to something with a little more character: National Peanuts Day. Charles Schulz’s classic comic strip intr...

Early Signals from July 2025 Bar Exam Results The National Conference of Bar Examiners has begun releasing first-time bar passage rates for jurisdictions that have reported July 2025 results, and the early numbers provide an interesting—if incomplete—snapshot. We now have data from seven jurisdictions, and the picture is ... mixed.Compared ...

Spit Happens: From Penalty Flags to Legal Claims Football is back, and the season wasted no time reminding us that emotions—and tempers—run high.In the NFL’s opening game Thursday night between the Dallas Cowboys and the Philadelphia Eagles, a defensive lineman for the Eagles was ejected just six seconds into the game for spitting on the opp...

A Labor Day Lesson: Employees vs. Independent Contractors When most people think of Labor Day, they picture a cookout, a parade, or maybe the unofficial end of summer. But at its core, Labor Day honors the American worker. In legal terms, it gives us the perfect moment to revisit one of the most frequently tested distinctions on the bar exam: the differenc...

When the MBE Rises, the Whole Bar Exam Rises With It Yesterday, the National Conference of Bar Examiners announced that the median score on the July 2025 Multistate Bar Examination rose to 142.4. That’s the highest summer average in more than a decade and the third straight July where national mean MBE scores have climbed.At first, this might sound ...

NCBE Announces National Mean for July 2025 MBE | NCBE The National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) announced today that the national mean scaled score for the July 2025 Multistate Bar Examination (MBE) was 142.4, an increase of about 0.6 points compared to the July 2024 mean of 141.8, and the highest July MBE mean since 2013 excluding the summer and...