Supreme Court justices on Wednesday backed the implementation of drastic reforms in the country’s legal education system.
In a speech during the Legal Education Summit, Chief Justice Lucas Bersamin and fellow SC magistrates agreed the need to update the basic law curriculum to adopt to best global practices and develop law graduates to become practice-ready lawyers.
Bersamin said he had started seeking the SC approval of revision of the rule on law student practice to now allow second year law students to practice legal profession in limited fields.
According to him, this measure was expected to make law graduates more practice ready, which could be a gauge of a quality legal education.
Bersamin observed that the legal education system in the country could be considered as “inadequate” as compared to the systems in developed countries.
Citing his delegation’s visit to law schools in Harvard, Suffolk and Georgetown universities in the US, Bersamin cited the need to shift from knowledge-based or Socratic approach in the country’s legal education system to experiential approach.
Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio said there was a need for globalization of the Philippine legal education.
Carpio expressed hopes law schools would strengthen international law teaching using local professors.
Associate Justice Diosdado Peralta called on law schools to strengthen their role and contribution in disposition of cases in courts.
He cited changes in procedural rules to allow this.
For his part, Associate Justice Marvic Leonen proposed several changes in the Bar exams including computerization, uploading of Bar questions and suggested answers in previous years in the SC website and removal of Top 10 and rankings to indicate only whether an examinee passed or failed.
The LES, a two-day event with the theme “Shifting Paradigm: Remodeling Legal Education in the Philippines,” was organized to determine the problems encountered in legal education and formulate possible solutions to address them.
In an earlier consultative meeting in Manila, Bersamin explained that “the impact of legal education on the lives of our people is far reaching, and cannot be taken for granted. The law itself pervades so much of public policy and human affairs.”
“There is no doubt at all, indeed, that legal education is essential to the maintenance of the Rule of Law, a regime that, for former UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, ‘is crucial for promoting economic growth, sustainable development, human rights, and access to justice,” Bersamin said.
“On the other hand, legal education is also difficult because addressing legal issues well and building good legal institutions are truly difficult…Of late, the quality of the legal training has come under much criticism following the dismal performance in recent years of our law graduates in the Bar Examinations the Supreme Court has administered annually,” he added.
Leonen said he intended to propose a “simple pass-or-fail system” for the 2020 Bar examinations.
Leonen, the 2020 Bar chair, said he also wanted to propose to his fellow justices in the SC the possibility of computerized tests to enable the conduct of exams in different areas.
He also said he would propose that the Court upload all Bar exam questions and suggested answers from the past 40 years to the SC website.
“These reforms have their own justification. I do not think this is the time that I will give my reasons. Suffice it to say that in any forum, I would be most willing to explain these justifications,” Leonen said in a speech.
The current Bar exam system requires examinees to write their answers by hand to questions covering eight subjects: political and international law, labor law and social legislation, civil law, taxation law, mercantile law, criminal law, remedial law, and legal and judicial ethics.
The exams are held across the four Sundays of November at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, and the release of the results months later is a highly-anticipated affair that usually leads off with the announcement of the top 10 highest scorers.
“Any intelligent, coherent justice will want the Bar to simply be a qualifying exam. It is not an exam to find out the most brilliant of lawyers. It is only an exam to add into our ranks those lawyers that deserve to practice,” Leonen said.
