The challenges of a Filipino law student

Last Wednesday at Cagayan de Oro, at a General Assembly (GA) with the law faculty and students of Liceo University, as the College dean I was tasked to give a message that embodied the policies and directions that I believed our law school should take. So in front of nearly 200 students, faculty and staff, I had to tell them the grim reality of the life of a Filipino law student: out of 10 law school graduates who take the Bar Exams, nearly eight of them will fail. Of course, that number doesn’t even account for the thousands of students who don’t even get to graduate. Last year, out of 4,847 Bar examinees, only 982 made the grade. Underlying this grim statistic was my simple message: if you want to become a lawyer — and not merely earn a law degree or have some legal knowledge — then our law school community would have to get down to serious, difficult, even painful work.

So I wasn’t Mr. Happy at the GA but I thought that I would be doing the stakeholders of the law school a great disservice by painting an overly rosy picture of law school life. Anyway, the law was never meant to be all roses, bunnies, and butterflies; the law deals with life in all its glory and all its ugliness. Since the ultimate aim of becoming a lawyer is the administration of justice, a matter that is inherently grave and serious, consequently the path to learning the law should be similarly serious and grave. Perhaps I may have dissuaded a few students by clearly demonstrating how difficult it was to become a lawyer in the Philippines but I nevertheless felt what I did was right. The aphorism is that the law is a jealous mistress; what this means is that the study of the law is inherently and intrinsically difficult and better that our students knew this from the beginning.

I could tell from the reaction of a few of the students at the assembly that it was a bitter pill to swallow. Unfortunately, some law students utterly detest hard work. They want to be spoon-fed and possess the erroneous belief that if they sit through their classes — preferably lecture-type classes without recitation and the rigors of the socratic method that is the hallmark of western-style legal education — then that will be sufficient for them to take the most difficult examination in the country. For a few, the handful of students who are exceptionally bright, they can breeze through law school, hardly study, and pass the Bar nonetheless. But these are the rarest of exceptions and the far bigger majority must struggle through the grind of hours of daily study, review of cases and attendance in class just to survive law school.

On a more positive note, I told the Liceo law students that the legal education that they had access to currently was vastly different from what I experienced in the ’90s, specifically in the sense that the playing field has become increasingly level and fair. The point about the leveling of the educational playing field was regarding the comparison between the provincial and Metro Manila-based law schools. Unlike in the ’90s, if you were a student in Mindanao it might be difficult for you to get the latest decisions of the Supreme Court or have difficulty obtaining the most recent statutes or rules of procedure.

However, since the Internet has become so accessible, whether through dedicated lines, DSL, or even via mobile Internet, and with the Supreme Court going online and some law firms making their database of cases and statutes available to the public, province-based law students have been placed on equal footing, in regard at least access to information, with their Manila-based counterparts. Very simply, whether you are an Ateneo, UP or Liceo student, you have access to the same jurisprudence, law and — because Rex and Central bookstores have branches or outlets in Mindanao and the Visayas — law books. So there is no longer any basis to claim that Manila students have an unfair educational advantage. In fact, as I told the attendees of the assembly, provincial students have a distinct and powerful advantage over those studying in Metro Manila: time. Since the pace of life is slower in the province — less traffic and less distractions — students in the province should have more time to focus on their studies and thus, hopefully, perform better in the bar exams.

Part of the reason why I told my students that they have a distinct time advantage over Manila students was to build the confidence of our students and to chip away at the inferiority complex that some provincial students unfortunately have. The foundation of success in any endeavor is always belief and self-confidence and so a big part of a dean’s job is to build up the confidence of his students and to help them believe that they can succeed. But, of course, the confidence mustn’t be based on hot air or delusion but rather on a foundation of skills and knowledge built from a habit of hard work and study. No amount of pep talks and encouragement will magically allow someone who hasn’t studied properly for an examination to make the grade. So aside from encouragement, an educational institution has to apply strictness and rigor, make the students strive and earn their grades, and make the students deserve to pass. As has been shown through experience, self-belief and hard work are a truly potent mix and the perfect formula for success in both the Bar exams and in life itself.

Finally, I emphasized, particularly to the freshmen, that if they entered law school in search of fortune, then they went to the wrong place. A cursory look at the Forbes list of the richest Filipinos in 2011 will show that not one of them is a lawyer by profession. On the point that a career in the law profession is not the most lucrative as compared to other vocations, I often tell my friends about my elder brother who, after taking a year of law school and deciding that it wasn’t for him, became far more financially successful than me through his astute investing and earning a good income from a chain of restaurants. If you want big bucks, then become an entrepreneur instead of an advocate. It is another painful truth for law students and lawyers that there are plenty of very poor attorneys and only those at the very top of the legal food chain can claim to be rich exclusively from the practice of law. In fact, when I attend court hearings, I see them — members of the Bar who after years of practice are apparently financially unsuccessful, often relegated to ambulance-chaser status, and accepting all manner of unmeritorious cases just to survive. However, since the ultimate goal of a bona fide lawyer is the administration of justice, whether or not you become financially rich in the practice of law, being a lawyer has the potential to become a truly noble, empowering and enriching calling. And that, for me, should be the real goal of a law school — not just to churn out legal technicians and mere scholars of the law but to graduate men and women who have a true passion and commitment to administering justice, which, sadly, is the rarest and most precious of commodities in the Philippines.