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In just over a month, some 6,000 law graduates all over the country will take the bar examinations, considered to be one of the most difficult law licensure tests in the world. It will run for eight hours a day for four Sundays in October. In the past 20 years, the passing percentage has ranged from a low of 16.59 per cent in 1999 and 17.25 per cent in 1992 to a rare high of 32.89 per cent in 2001 and 31.95 in 2011.
The questions that play in the mind of the general public is, are law schools not doing enough to prepare their students to pass the bar exams? Is the bigger number of Filipino law graduates not good enough to make the cut?
In the first-ever conference on legal education jointly organized by the Legal Education Board, a government institution, and the Philippine Association of Law Schools held in Cebu City from August 16 to 17, the answers to these questions, and more, were sought and explored.
Law schools are the ones that teach and prepare law students to join the Philippine bar and practice law. And since the onus is on them to produce lawyers who can cope with the changing times and compete in the arena of international legal standards, their law curricula must adjust and adapt as well. The University of the Philippines, for instance, has offered more electives geared to put their students in the tracks or specializations of their choice. For instance, UP has been offering alternative dispute resolution courses (considered as the wave of the future), environmental law, international humanitarian law, intellectual property, and other new courses that will prepare future lawyers in the practice of new fields of law. Many other law schools have tried, or at least, desired, to follow suit by implementing changes in their law curricula to make them more relevant. Yet, being innovative has its price and costly it is. In UP’s change of curriculum to make the study of law more relevant; more skills and practice-oriented, rather than being purely knowledge-gathering-oriented; it has suffered the consequence of losing the top ranks in the bar exam to other law schools and of having a good number of examinees fail. UP Law alumni have bemoaned this as passing the bar exams in the past was a matter of course for UP law graduates.
Now, more than ever, the consensus among law school deans and professors is for law schools to be given greater academic freedom in developing their respective curriculum to make it more responsive to the times. The Asean integration of 2015 is, after all, fast approaching. Recall that in 2000, the 10 member states of Southeast Asia have agreed to narrow the development gap among its members. In 2015, trade barriers will be lifted to allow for the free flow of goods and services in the Southeast Asian region. This means that Filipino lawyers must be skilled in, and prepared, to practice in international trade law, intellectual property, cyber law, international arbitration and many other new fields.
Unfortunately, there’s a catch. Law students must first pass the bar examinations before they can even begin to practice any area in law. The administration of the bar examinations, however, is done by the Supreme Court of the Philippines while the crafting of bar exam questions is done by the examiners chosen by the Chairman who is an associate justice of the Supreme Court. While the justices of the Supreme Court are supreme in the adjudication of cases and dispensation of justice in accordance with the Constitution and the laws they are, however, not in the business of legal education. Imagine a teacher teaching a class of pupils while someone else who did not do the teaching gives the test. The result is predictable. A greater number will fail and this is exactly what happens in the bar examinations. A former dean and professor of law, Pacifico Agabin, said that the bar examination has made academic freedom truly academic. To survive, the natural impulse of law schools is to cater and pander to how the Supreme Court views and carries out the bar examinations. What is unfortunate is that the substance of the bar examination has remained the same since its inception in 1900 or 113 years ago.
Thus, certain subjects remain to be bar subjects when in reality, very few lawyers specialize in them. These are: taxation, labor law, some areas in commercial law such as negotiable instruments law—now practically a dead law—banking, public administration and a few others. There is, thus, a clear disconnect between what is taught in law schools and what are given in the bar examinations.
What do the law deans propose? That the bar exam cover only four core subjects which could be taken in only two instead of four Sundays. These are political law, criminal law, civil law and remedial law. Legal ethics could be integrated into all the four core subjects. Then, when lawyers pass the bar examinations, it will be up to them to study some more toward their chosen tracks or fields of specialization. And to ensure the quality of students who will enroll in law schools, they also proposed that there be a uniform national entrance examination for all law school applicants as a minimum admission requirement.
It is time to rethink the bar examination. It is the only way legal education will ever change radically to produce competent, ethical and dynamic lawyers capable of responding to the changing needs of the millennium.
Email: ritalindaj@gmail.com Visit: www.jimenolaw.com.ph.
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