September is the bar examination month in the Philippines. Once again, parents and bar examinees suffer the grueling effects of extreme anxiety and mental fatigue as they nervously face the annual bar examination.
If there is one life experience I do not wish to repeat, it is to take the bar examination all over again. The bar examination is mentally and physically exhausting, no matter how strong, able, stable, intelligent and competent the examinees may be.
I recall that when I took my own bar examination in 1984, where I placed 3rd nationwide (with a grade of 90.95% and where only 22% passed out of about 2,500 examinees), I exerted my utmost best to really study very hard, to the extent of living away from my wife and children for a few months and taking a full-time leave from my management-level office work in order to fully concentrate on my demanding bar review classes and voluminous readings.
I thank my former employer, the late Rep. Maria Clara L. Lobregat, in her capacity as the president of the Philippine Coconut Producers Federation, Inc. (Cocofed), for the full law scholarship that she and the federation had given me. My scholarship was part of the aggressive and well-funded staff development program of the federation, where I worked as a young executive managing the Cocofed municipal and provincial chapters of the coconut industry in the entire Visayas Region (Central Philippines) from 1975 to 1994.
I wish the 2009 bar examinees all the best.
May I share below the recent column of former Supreme Court Associate Justice Isagani Cruz on the current bar exams.
Separate Opinion
The bar tests again
By Isagani A. Cruz
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:38:00 09/06/2009
TODAY is the first day of the regular scheduled on the four Sundays of September by the Supreme Court to determine who among the examinees shall be admitted as members of the Philippine bar and entitled to practice law in this country.
Such recognition is extended only to those who shall have passed the prescribed subjects, viz., Political Law and International Law, Labor Law, Civil Law, Taxation, Commercial Law, Criminal Law, Remedial Law, and Legal Ethics and Practical Exercises, or gained an average grade of 75 percent in all the said subjects without obtaining a disqualifying grade of 50 percent in any subject despite obtaining perfect grades in the other tests.
Citizens of the Philippines who have finished the Law course approved by the Supreme Court and not otherwise disqualified by moral or other causes, including those who have before flunked the bar examinations, subject to their taking review courses if they shall have previously flunked the tests three times, but never again if they have failed for the fifth time.
The performance of the first takers with the record of the bar flunkers in previous years (who usually fail again) necessarily decreases the national passing percentage of the bar takers. At times, however, the Supreme Court may adopt a more lenient attitude in the admission of the bar candidates by lowering the general requirements and the quality of the bar as well.
Still, there are those who say that the bar examinations are an unreliable guide in assessing the qualifications of the ordinary lawyer, whose credentials are best demonstrated by his subsequent conduct in his choice of what is vaguely defined as the practice of the law.
In one controversial case, the phrase was liberally construed as almost everything requiring knowledge of the law, including all lawful undertaking in modern society, such as operating any business, running a philanthropic service, or delivering speeches in the streets, all of which involve somehow or other knowledge of the applicable law. I dissented from the absurd rule and said that the only activity that would not be included would be the efforts of a retired lawyer teaching ballroom dancing and escorting wrinkled ladies with pubescent pretensions.
The honor roll of bar candidates who have topped the bar examinations and proved equal to their just expectations are proudly numberless. Roxas, Laurel, Pelaez, Concepcion, Labrador, Macapagal, Tolentino, Padilla, Salonga, Diokno, Teehankee (including the ladies like Muñoz-Palma, Agrava, Melencio-Herrera, and Griño-Aquino), and lately Montecillo, Regalado, Robles, Brion – the list is practically resplendent.
Unfortunately, there are others who have not exploited their former prestige and failed to make good their promise as leaders of the Philippine bar even as there are also those who barely passed the bar tests and yet made it to the Supreme Court like Justice Antonio Barredo, not that his decisions were top of the line.
Some justices who ranked among the top 10 in the bar examinations have been disciplined and even disbarred for improper conduct as in the case of one who was proved to have purposely destroyed the evidence against a hostile party but was later restored to the practice of law on recommendation of respected jurists because of his academic record. Once rehabilitated, however, he openly repeated his old roguery and was barred again, this time for good. Lawyers with more renown and less rectitude have also marred what has proudly and correctly been called the noblest profession in the world.
Of late, women have outnumbered the men in the population of law schools, including their honors in the bar examinations. The reason may be that ladies are more serious in their studies, including memory work in which they have established some sort of record. Their male counterparts have been more active as litigators, leaving the ladies to do research work in which they have proved more patient and less provocative.
The exception is for their more belligerent sisters, like the late Haydee Yorac, who once seriously challenged a male prosecutor to a boxing bout.
The basic problem with the bar examinations is that they ask questions to prove what the examinees do not know and not matters they know and have diligently reviewed. Only recently, they were asked to identify the president of the International Court of Justice, whom even our Chief Justice probably did not know. Earlier, the question asked was about the writ of amparo which had not yet been adopted by our Supreme Court as part of our Rules of Court at the time. Only Justice Adolfo S. Azcuna probably could have answered that curious number then.
Even worse is the ignorance of the examiner, who often never even taught in law school. In one test, he could not distinguish between the budget and the appropriation bill, which law professors take pains to distinguish. And earlier, the examinees were asked about the Island of Palmas case, which they only vaguely remembered but not its doctrine that they understood and could have earned them full credit. They later angrily burned their books in International Law.
Pray, bar takers, that the examiners will ask the right questions and the Supreme Court will have the correct answers.
See:
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20090906-223771/The-bar-tests-again
