See - https://news.mb.com.ph/2018/07/04/association-of-law-students-of-the-philippines-legal-education/
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Association of law students of the Philippines & legal education
Published July 4, 2018, 12:05 AM
THE LEGAL FRONT
By J. Art D. Brion (ret.)
Law students are the third (and often overlooked) party in legal education, the other two parties being the Legal Education Board (the LEB, as regulator) and the law schools (collectively represented by the PALS, the Philippine Association of Law Schools).
In 1991, law students organized themselves into an organization they named the Law Students Association of the Philippines (LSAP), now recognized as the student counterpart of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP). Originally composed of students of Manila law schools, its membership now covers almost all law schools nationwide. It now stands on equal footing with the PALS and is given equal representation at the LEB.
The LSAP is currently headed by its president, Rafael Ricalde, a 4th year student of the UP College of Law. The association shall hold its 2018 annual convention in Davao City on July 6 – 7, with the Maria Jesus College and the Ateneo de Davao as hosts. Early reports indicate that President Rodrigo Duterte and Acting Chief Justice Antonio Carpio will be the main speakers in the two-day event.
My congratulations to the LSAP for keeping interest in legal education very much alive. They, more than anybody else, should ensure that this torch is continually lit. Thus, I hope that their convention will not simply be a social affair and shall instead highlight the law students’ most vital educational concerns in these transition days of constitutional reform and redirection in the implementation of the law in our society.
Law students face a very daunting task in their bid to be lawyers as legal education is a major undertaking. It involves a very lengthy (and many times, a very costly) process where admission requires a four-year law degree with mandatory units in English, mathematics, and social sciences. Legal developments also continually take place to cope with our society’s increasingly complicated needs.
The law course itself involves another four years of studies for either a Juris Doctor (J.D.) or a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) degree. Only after graduating from either of these degrees can a student proceed to apply for the Bar examinations that the Supreme Court administers as a requirement for admission to the practice of law.
The Bar examinations, unfortunately, have never been easy to hurdle. While there may be some exceptional years when the passing percentage has been unusually high (as in the 2016 Bar examinations when 59.5% passed), the average passing percentage over the last 20 or so years has mostly been in the 20s.
A prime example is last year’s 2017 Bar examinations whose national passing rate was 25.5%. This passing rate translates to 1 successful examinee for every 4 who took the Bar exam. Hiding behind this statement of success is that 3 others failed.
After 8 years of higher education studies, these results are very hard to calmly accept. Failure means another year of law review struggle and another exam under the same odds. By Supreme Court decree, those who fail 3 times must return to law school for a year of refresher law studies before the failing examinee can take another crack at the Bar examinations.
These reasons alone dictate that law students should show an active and continuing concern for the education they receive from their law schools, now numbering about 130 Philippines-wide. The pass/fail percentages, of course, consider the results of all these law schools taken together. Actually, some law schools do very well with scores as high as 100% (mostly, the schools with limited number of examinees) and 75% or higher among the first-tier law schools with higher enrollments.
Further breakdown of the pass/fail statistics and their distribution among law schools cannot but highlight that a good number of law schools do not even have a single successful examinee in some Bar exam years! When this happens year after year to the same law schools, the public invariably looks with a quizzical eye at the Legal Education Board (LEB), the agency that regulates legal education.
The LEB, however, does not solely determine the success/failure rates in the Bar examinations. Even LSAP President Raffy Ricalde admits that it has been trying its best “to improve the standards of legal education in the country.” A serious look at the causes of failures must also consider the law schools’ capability to teach law, as well as the students’ capability to handle the challenges of law studies.
Are the students entering law schools properly prepared by their college education to undertake the serious studies legal education requires?
Are law schools in fact accepting unqualified law students and these schools really equipped to teach law with the rigor and to the standards that the Supreme Court and public interest require?
Does the PALS police its ranks to ensure that its member-schools possess continuing teaching qualifications and are not shortchanging its students?
Perhaps the time has come for the LEB to widely publicize the law school closures it has been imposing, to ensure the public that it has seriously been attending to its mandated tasks.
One recent measure the LEB has undertaken is the requirement of a nationally administered law school admission test (the PhilSAT) for all those entering law school. The LEB imposed this requirement in 2017 when it gave its first PhilSAT entrance examination.
In view of its novelty, the board allowed the conditional admission of those who missed the entrance exam and those who failed in their first attempt, subject to their passing the exam administered in September, 2017. Reportedly, many of those conditionally admitted still failed to hurdle the PhilSAT.
The entrance exam requirement is now in its 2nd year and the LEB has reiterated its strict “no-PhilSAT, no-admission” rule. The enrollment in many PALS member-schools has allegedly suffered, prompting the PALS to ask for the reconsideration of what it felt is a very strict LEB implementation of the PhilSAT requirement.
How the LEB – with its new board members, Atty. Abelardo Domondon (an engineering board and bar topnotcher and veteran law professor) and student Catherine Pedrosa (a CPA who is in her 4th year law at the UP) – will act remains to be seen. Many hope it will exercise the utmost wisdom in its coming ruling.
The LEB, for its part, hopes that the appointing authorities shall find the time and the attention to complete its ranks. It still badly needs two more members to fill up its full seven-man board.
A bright note in the horizon is that even without any prompting from the LEB, one legal community – through their bar association – has already responded to the needs of their local law students by sharing in the legal education load of their local law school.
This happened in San Pablo City where the College of Law of the San Pablo Colleges (with retired Judge Bienvenido Reyes as immediately past dean and Atty. Vic Joyas as the new dean) and the San Pablo City Bar Association (a voluntary association of local lawyers led by Atty. Candido Javaluyas) entered into a memorandum of agreement on bar association assistance to the SPC College of Law students.
The bar association committed to provide scholarships to deserving law students and to enhance the students’ legal education through the holding of seminars and lectures supplementing those provided by the College of Law. These approaches, the bar association believes, should give the students a big boost in their quest to be lawyers.
Informally advised of this move, LEB Chairman Emerson Aquende asked that the LEB be furnished a copy of the MOA for its consideration as a model for the Integrated Bar and other communities to emulate.
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