It has been a whirlwind (crappy pun not intended) few days here in New York City as we deal with Hurricane Sandy and her aftermath. Thankfully everyone here at Manhattan Prep is OK — and we sincerely hope the same is true for you and your family.

As LSAC is located in rural Pennsylvania, they have been affected by the storm. According to their official twitter feed, @Official_LSAT, LSAC’s offices are closed due to power outages, and the release of October LSAT results may be delayed beyond the Oct 31st release date.

If you’ve been following this blog, you know that LSAC traditionally releases scores at least a couple of days ahead of their stated release date. For the first time ever, they may miss their stated score release deadline. The following was tweeted by LSAC at approximately 9:20am today:

“We still expect scores to be released by Thursday afternoon.”

LSAC also commented via twitter about December LSAT registration:

“We expect to be back online today. We will make sure you get registered for Dec. and will waive the late reg fee”

As for Manhattan Prep, we’re dealing with some loss of power at our headquarters in Manhattan. We’ll continue to monitor our phone lines and email inboxes remotely, but it may be a day or two still before we’re able to resume our in person courses in New York, Washington DC, and Boston. If you are a student in any of those clases, we will continue to keep you posted via phone and email. All other classes (live online or in unaffected cities) will resume normally. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact studentservices@manhattanprep.com/lsat/ or call (646) 254-6480.

News flash: Halloween is tomorrow! Presumably, you’ve been too wrapped up in LSAT prep to even take the time to brainstorm costume ideas.
But don’t worry, we’ve got your back. How about dressing up as a funny, scary, or realistic version of your future self? Or a popular legal reference? Here’s some inspiration to get your creative juices flowing:

1. Colonial Lawyer:  Take the traditional route and pop on a black robe and white collar and wig.
2. My Cousin Vinny: Plenty of options for this one. You could go with the all black ensemble (black pants, leather jacket, and silver belt and chain) or you could spice it up with a brown/orange suit, complete with a matching bowtie, white button-down, and heavy New York accent.
3. A Lawsuit: Wear a suit and attach legal documents all over it (Amendments of the Constitution, the UCC, Restatement of Torts) .
4. The Second Amendment: Wear a sleeveless shirt.
5. The Socratic Method: Get a white sheet from the linen closet and style a Greek toga. Sling a colored sash around your shoulder with the word “method” written across it.
6. Judge: A white, curly wig, pair of glasses, white turtleneck, and black robe should do the trick. Add some pizzazz by adopting a New York accent and calling yourself Judy.
7. Elle Woods: Bring out anything and everything pink. Pink dress, skirt, shirt, heels, and hat. If you’re not a natural blonde, grab a wig, as this is a pretty essential part of the costume. Don’t forget to pick up a Chihuahua and dress him in a matching pink outfit.
8. The Lazy Lawyer: For those who want something more subtle or are just too lazy to put a complete costume together, throw on the shirt pictured above from Zazzle.com.
9. Yourself: If you don’t fancy the whole costume idea, just go as the studious LSAT student that you are. Accessorize with you’re pencils, stopwatch, and Manhattan LSAT Strategy guides.

Already have your costume picked and ready to go? We’d love to hear your ideas! Leave us a comment or tweet @Manhattanlsat

Here are the free LSAT events we’re holding this week.

10/30/12 – Los Angeles, CA – Free Trial Class – 6:30-9:30 PM

11/3/12 – Washington, D.C. – Free Proctored LSAT Exam – 6:00-10:00 PM

11/3/12 – Santa Monica, CA – Free Proctored LSAT Exam – 6:00-10:00 PM

11/3/12 – Irvine, CA – Free Proctored LSAT Exam – 9:30 AM – 1:30 PM

11/3/12 – La Jolla, CA – Free Proctored LSAT Exam – 9:30 AM – 1:30 PM

Looking for more free events? Check out our Free Events Listings Page.

Law doesn’t just happen in courtrooms and legislative buildings. It’s actually all around us, and a new radio and multimedia project in which one of our instructors (and frequent contributor to this blog), Mary Adkins, is involved explores all the ways in which that’s true.

The Life of the Law may interest many of you, particularly those of you who have gotten into the podcast craze–season one of their podcast just wrapped up, and all the episodes are available on the site.

For a contemplation of just how broad “the law” is, check out in particular Mary’s ongoing photo series, What The Law Looks Like. Here are a few of her shots:

Dump At Your Own Risk

Waiting to Cross

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Still waiting for your October LSAT score? Pass the time by catching up with some of this week’s top stories about legal education. Happy Reading!

Network ‘Yer Face Off! (Legal Skills Prof Blog)

LSAT scores will be here...soon

Legal Skills Prof Blog has some great advice for law students hoping to secure a job upon graduation. It’s all about networking!

The Shift Toward Law School Specialization(The New York Times Deal Book Blog)

Are general professional degrees in law a thing of the past? Find out how law schools are restructuring their curriculums to allow for increased specialization.

The Short on Long-Term Planning: Go to the Sources, and Here They Are (jdMission)

Want to know what makes for a strong law school application? Here are some answers from admissions officers at Yale, Michigan, and Columbia.
Read more

Perhaps the cruelest part of taking the LSAT is the 3-4 week waiting period that test takers are subjected to before receiving their results from LSAC. It’s hard to imagine what the reason for this is, given that it is 2012 and the test is taken on a bubble sheet that can be easily run through a scan-tron machine. Being such a high stakes test, it’s no wonder why people waiting for their results will literally pull their hair out right around this time, when scores could literally be released any day now.

Any day now? Yes. While LSAC touts October 31st on their website as the day that scores will be released, past trends indicate that they consistently email scores out 3-5 days sooner than that.

The result of this imprecision is that October LSAT takers spend several days in a nervous stupor, constantly peaking at their inboxes through hand covered eyes to see if their results have arrived.

Guessing when LSAT scores will arrive is an imperfect science at best, but that doesn’t stop us from making our official prediction. In February of this year, LSAC cruelly released scores just one day before their listed release date. In July, they redeemed themselves by releasing scores 4 days early.

I’m very confident that October 2012 scores will be released either Friday (tomorrow) October 26th, or Monday, October 29th. I’m feeling optimistic today, so I’m going to go out on a limb and predict a score release of Friday, October 26th. Again, this is just a prediction — I don’t have any inside information. If I did, you’d all be the first to know. (Update: It appears as though my attempts to will the release of LSAT scores today was unsuccessful. I am as disappointed as you all are. Hopefully Monday is the day!)

Good luck to all of you who took this thing in October. Don’t forget to register for our free online review of the October LSAT, which will include explanations for the most difficult problems on the October exam.

The 3rd Edition Manhattan LSAT Strategy Guides

We are pleased to introduce to the world the newest (3rd) Edition of our renowned LSAT Strategy Guide series, on sale now in our store and on Amazon.

This time around we’ve overhauled our Logic Games Strategy Guide, nearly doubling its size. Like a geeky piece of cake that goes straight to the hips, we’ve added substantial bulk to our explanations, including hand written solutions for every game from PTs 40-66, simply because we love you.

So far the chosen few who have received advance copies of the LG book cannot stop raving about it. One forum user out there even admitted to wishing that they were still prepping the LSAT, just so they could read out new book. Yes, it is that awesome!

While the Logic Games Strategy Guide has been enhanced significantly, our Reading Comprehension and Logical Reasoning guides received simple face lifts and remain the basically the same awesome guides that they were in our 2nd Editions.

How Would The Supreme Court Perform on the LSAT?

A question I often hear is, “Does the LSAT actually have anything to do with law school?” And the answer is, however incredibly obnoxious, yes and no.

You don’t do logic games in law school, I’m sorry to report (because the first semester of law school makes logic games look pretty fun). And you don’t answer multiple choice questions in which you evaluate the logic of arguments.

However, you do use the reading and reasoning skills you’ve developed studying for the LSAT: dissecting arguments to determine their structure,

evaluating their internal coherence, and identifying where and how parties (or judges) disagree on the issue.

Do the kinds of “flaws” we look for on the LSAT actually appear in the cases you’ll read? Law professor Andrew J. McClurg, in a fascinating article that you can download and read for free here, shows us the answer is yes. They do.

McClurg examined a number of logical fallacies in Supreme Court decisions, focusing specifically on Justice Rehnquist (the article is kind of old) for reasons he explains that I won’t get into here. I recently stumbled on the article and plucked a few of my favorite examples to share, followed by LSAT questions that exhibit the same flaws. If you’re curious, geek out by finding the flaws in the Court’s reasoning below and then comparing them to the LSAT questions that are analogous:
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Here are the free LSAT events we’re holding this week.

10/23/12 – Online – Writing Your Way Into Law School Workshop (with jdMission) – 8:30-10:00 PM

10/27/12 – New York, NY – Free Proctored Practice LSAT – 9:30 AM – 1:30 PM

10/27/12 – Online – Free Online Trial Class – 12:00-3:00 PM

10/28/12 – Zen and the Art of LSAT Review Session – 8:00-10:00 PM

Looking for more free events? Check out our Free Events Listings Page.

Wahoo!

Happy Friday, everyone! Take a break to check out our weekly set of LSAT and law school-related links.

Want to Stand Out from the Pack? Start a Blog! (The Girl’s Guide to Law School)

Ruth Carter, author of The Legal Side of Blogging: How Not to get Sued, Fired, Arrested, or Killed, talks about why law students should start blogging and offers some tips for getting started.

The Short on Long-Term Planning: To Addend or Not Addend? (jdMission)

This week our friends over at jdMission explain why you should not write an addendum explaining your LSAT score.
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