For generations of law school graduates, summer has often been an illusory concept, one replaced by long days spent in airless study halls or makeshift classrooms practicing mind-numbing rote memorization in preparation for the high-stakes bar exam in late July, a time when most of their friends are enjoying backyard barbecues or lazy afternoons at the beach.

But a lost summer no longer has to mean a nonsummer, as many bar students are starting to discover. Many Type A lawyer hopefuls are finding ways to make the best of a stressful situation by holing up at beach houses, having bar review courses live-streamed to vacation spots like Paris or Thailand, or even, in one extreme example, absorbing lessons by headphones from a table at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.

If you are sentenced to a summer in study hell, you might as well relocate it to Negril, Jamaica.

That was the conclusion of Casey Pearlman and her boyfriend, Evan Sypek, who graduated from New York University School of Law last year and decided they could not bear the idea of spending a summer in the city among the miserable.

Instead, they took flight to Negril, a coastal resort town, where they rented a three-bedroom house on the beach for $3,000 for six weeks and converted it to Study Command Central. Starting at 9 a.m., they would hunker over their iPads loaded with study materials and a cup of Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee. Around lunch, they would break for a bike ride into town for fish curry and a $1 Red Stripe.