Matsuzaki’s Folly

In Ken Matsuzaki’s quest to pass the New York State bar exam, the seventeenth time was the charm. The test is offered twice a year, in February and July, and Matsuzaki had sat for every one since completing Cardozo law school, in early 2005. He’s taken the bar in Brooklyn, in Albany, in the vast Javits Center, in Manhattan (“I don’t like that one,” he said. “Lines too long at the bathrooms”), and, this past February, in Buffalo. “I like Buffalo,” he said. "Less crowded. I could reserve a hotel very close to the testing place."

Let us honor Ken Matsuzaki; a New Yorker article in the "cutesy" section detailed how cute-cute it was that the tenacious Japanese national took the New York Bar Exam seventeen times, and in different locations—like a sort of lemming/super-snowflake Grand Tour. In the midst of La Débâcle, with applications to law schools declining by one-third in just four years, some schools facing closure,  the market saturated worse than a Crisco-lard hybrid pie crust, and disaster facing even the big law pedigreed, there are still people spending the equivalent of a new car on seventeen bar exam fees when they are not even intending on practicing law (should they actually pass, never a certainty, nor even a likelihood). Further in the article, the New York Bar, when asked for a comment, added that at least two people had taken the bar of that state over sixty times each (not "six", but "sixty"). Sixty bar exams, at the very least, must have been taken over 30 years should the sucker-victim attempt both summer and winter. The fee to take the test appears to be $250 a pop.


The main victim of the scam, besides the taxpayer and the economy, which is incredibly harmed by the inefficient allocation of human capital to further unneeded degree-based-indoctrination in a surfeited-until-sick-and-bursting "profession", is the stupent himself. Maybe we cannot stop the snowflakes from falling because we are using reasoning and not an oak-table leg to the head to expose the scam. But one cannot use reason against the unreasonable, anymore than we can use rationality against the irrational. We are speaking human language to animals. Whatever motivates a Matsuzaki to take a bar exam 17 times is instinct and not conscious thought process. What would possess a Goyische foreign national to attend a Yeshiva's law school and spend a decade taking repeated tests, which I presume must be substantially about interpretation and knowledge of New York state code? 

This may be an unusual case, otherwise the New Yorker would not have bothered to report on it (oh-so-cute! Little-bowing-man took exam many time!), but if so, it differs only in degree and not in kind from the rest of the special "noflakes" (as a jobless ice crystal should be called). And if Matsuzaki is extreme, how about the two bufónes who took the exam sixty times each. Even if they finally passed, it would be in their retirement age, and they could enter a profession that is more oversaturated than the "Super Size Me" guy's aorta.

Ridiculous.