Family Law & Trusts and Estates Practice NextGen Bar Exam Study Guide

From chapter 1, Marriage

From the outside, marriage looks simple: two people, a ceremony, a certificate. But the law treats marriage as a legal status that flips on an entire package of rights and duties at once — how property is owned, who inherits, who can sue for a spouse's wrongful death, who makes medical decisions, and how support works if the relationship ends. Because so much rides on that status, the law cares intensely about whether a marriage is actually valid, and it gives courts tools to declare that a so-called marriage never counted at all. This note walks the whole life cycle of getting married: what makes a marriage valid, who is barred from marrying, the difference between a marriage that is void and one that is merely voidable, informal (common-law) marriage, the doctrines that protect people who marry in good faith, same-sex marriage, when one state must honor a marriage from another, the agreements couples sign before and during marriage, and the rights the status creates. This topic is starred, so you must recall these rules cold — especially the void-versus-voidable distinction, which the official outline flags as memorize-level. Where the exam does hand you a statute (say, a state's licensing or age rule), apply the statute you are given.

From chapter 1, Working with Provided Wills & Trusts Law

Trusts and estates is the law of what happens to your property when you die, and how property can be held and managed for other people through a trust. On the old bar exam you had to memorize hundreds of these rules. The NextGen exam does something different and, honestly, kinder: it hands you the governing law. Every trusts-and-estates task on the NextGen exam comes packaged with the statutes, rules, or the actual will or trust document you need, and you are graded on whether you can read that law and apply it to a client's real problem. That makes this a skills topic, not a memory topic. Your job is not to recite the rule against perpetuities from memory — it is to find the provided provision, break it into its parts, and use it. This note teaches that method step by step, then gives you a quick map of the wills-and-trusts landscape so you can move through a provided statute quickly and confidently. Treat every rule below as something the exam will put in front of you, not something you must recall cold.