legal education in the philippines

8/9/2019 Legal Education in the Philippines

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Legal Education in the Philippines: An Appraisal and a Forecast / 1

Legal Education in the Philippines: An Appraisal and A ForecastBy Jovito R. Salonga, Dean, College of Law, FEU.

Delivered at the UP College of Law Golden Symposium (1961). Salonga, A Plea for

Sobriety, Regina Publishing Company, 1963. (All rights reserved)

In 1961, I was requested by Dean (later Supreme Court Justice) Vicente Abad Santos

of the UP College of Law to come back and deliver this speech on the future of legal

education in the Philippines. I complied with his request. But I knew that in a few

months, I would be campaigning for a seat in Congress, thus translating into action

what I had stressed in my speech, namely, the participation of students and professors

from the various law schools in the crucial issues of the day. Many of my former

students in Rizal helped in every possible way so that my dream would become a reality.

In any event, the question maybe asked: in the year 2003, has there been any significant

change in the system of legal education in the Philippines? Jovito R. Salonga, 2003.

May I be permitted to express my gratitude and the gratitude of the Institute I

represent, for the invitation so kindly extended by Dean Vicente Abad Santos to speak at

this Conference on Effective Legal Education? I express my thanks notwithstanding the

definition of a conference by a wit, namely, that it is a gathering of people who singly

can do nothing, but together can decide that, nothing can be done.

There is admittedly a great deal of difficulty in passing judgment upon a situation in

which one is deeply and directly involved. One so situated can go all the way from a

posture of self-disparagement, thereby meriting a writer's reminder - "Never speak ill of

yourself; your friends will always say enough on that subject" - to an attitude of self-

righteousness and pride, a trait so aptly characterized by someone as God's gift to little

men. And so as one who has taught law for a good number of years, I shall attempt, with

your kind indulgence, to chart a middle course, despite the warning of a noted critic that

"the middle course is a fatal thing, for nothing succeeds like excess." There is general

agreement among responsible educators that an educational system is not worth much if

it teaches men to get a living and does not teach them how to live. Considering that the

end of law in a free society is the moulding and establishment of a social order

approximating our highest aspirations of human dignity and functioning with the least

friction and waste, it may be fair to ultimately measure legal education anywhere in the

light of the question: Does it teach men how to live? Put in more specific terms, does it

have the capacity, the resources and the imagination to teach law in the grand manner?

To answer his question adequately, we must first consider the cold facts of present-day

legal education in the Philippines.

These are the facts. With the exception of the College of Law of the State University,

all law schools in this country are of private ownership. Except for few that offer


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morning classes, our law schools are essentially night schools.

There are 22 law schools in the city of Manila and 55 in the provinces. At e close of

the last school year, there were 11,529 students enrolled in the basic law course.

A cursory glance at the faculty list of any law school reveals that the teaching staff is

almost always composed of a few full-time professors and a score of practitioners,

judges and other public officials. Among these faculty members ay be found persons

who have distinguished themselves in a variety of ways penning decisions, rendering

some form of public service, writing books, practicing before the cou2rts of the land.

There is no reliable data as to the proportion of full-time teachers to part-time teachers

but there is little dispute that part-time teachers are in the preponderant majority.

There is almost no difference between one law school and another as to curriculum.

The subjects are pretty much the same, both in nomenclature and content. Regulation

and supervision by the Bureau of Private Schools has induced some kind of inflexible

conformity which has inspired a good deal skepticism among thinking observers. And

the necessity of tailoring the subject matter of courses to the demands of the yearly bar

examinations has rendered this conformity nothing less than deadening.

Teaching methods, tools and materials, have to be devised to fit the student's desire to

pass the bar test. Quizzers and pre-bar reviewers are the most favored commodities; the

students feel secure with answers that are as certain as they are simple and the moredogmatic the answers the more impressive. Too much publicity on bar results has

somehow strengthened the old myth that the best schools and the best teacher are those

that can produce bar topnotchers. From first year up, the student's mind is made sharply

and increasingly aware of the need to equip himself for his tussle with the bar examiner.

The result is something that law teachers and educators themselves ironically deplore.

Memory skill has displaced incisive analysis and reflection. Law ceases to be a living,

ever-growing instrument of social control but instead becomes just another field of

knowledge loaded with definitions, enumerations and distinctions. Review materials and

canned briefs are favorite hunting grounds because they yield so much distilledinformation to anyone diligent enough to memorize. The result is the multiplication of

schooled parrots, repeating by rote what is read and knowing not what is meant. A form

of collective fraud is at once foisted: the teacher is induced to think that the student

adept at memory work is "brilliant"; the latter is deluded into thinking that he has what

it takes to be a legal genius and other students who insistently inquire into the

philosophy and function of the rules are hastily labeled as heckling morons.

This orientation dictates the kind of library the average law school is bound to have:

an improvised collection of textbooks, handbooks, reviewers, quizzers, which are very

much in demand along with such volumes of Manresa, Viola, the Corpus Juris, the


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Reading Case Law or American Jurisprudence as would satisfy the supervisors of the

Bureau of Private Schools that here, at last, is a law school.

Naturally, the system does not provide enough incentive for that kind of critical

thinking and independent judgment that should be the hallmark of an educated legal

mind. The average, easygoing law student accepts as pure gospel truth whatever is

dished out to him by the textbook or quizzer and stores it in his memory as something

final and absolute. He seems only too pleased to be a captive of the printed page. This is

the danger against which the best minds have warned us - namely, the danger of wisdom

being lost in knowledge and knowledge being lost in information. It is in such an

atmosphere that the student at the outset draws a sharp distinction between bar subjects

and nonbar subjects. Bar subjects are adequately regarded with reverence and non-barsubjects such as Roman Law, Legal Research and Jurisprudence are considered so much

waste of time.

Ironically, again, the results of such a system have been condemned by the very same

persons for whom the system was allegedly devised. Every year we are told by the bar

examiners that the poor results unmistakably indicate that the average law graduate has

little perceptiveness, displays such poor quality of expression as would horrify his

teachers in the lower grades and is simply unable to think accurately and clearly.

The consistently poor batting average of a number of law schools in the Philippines in

reference to the bar tests has led many to wonder whether there are just too many

students pursuing the law course, without the benefit of the necessary background and

with little appreciation of the rigorous demands of the law career. On the other hand, the

excellent showing of some students in private law schools has generated a conviction

that properly administered, these law schools may well be focal center of leadership for

the youth of the land. For whether we like it or not - and I am sure there are many of us

who like it - our type of society is lawyer-dominated and in the context of that society

the law profession is one that certainly plays a dominant role. When Dean Malcolm

states that the UP law alumni "have become largely responsible for the destiny of the

Republic" he has made a point which lawyers in this country are only too eager to stress.

At any rate, it is probably this mixed conviction that has led the Supreme Court to

require a type of selective admission that private law schools, left to themselves, could

not impose. The four-year degree in arts or sciences as a prerequisite to admission in the

law school is of course bound to produce far-reaching effects.

But even as this requirement is being imposed, the most vulnerable aspect of law

school administration shows up unmistakably. The financial condition of any school is a

factor of decisive importance since so much depends upon it - the library and physical

plant, the faculty personnel, the standard of scholarship and admission practices. In the


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case of private law schools, the source of their revenue is almost exclusively the tuition

fees collected from the students every semester. When we consider the fact that the

tuition fees here are way below the fees collected in most American law schools, the

precarious condition of our law schools should be obvious.

It is therefore a little harsh and unfair to compare our system of legal education with

the system of American legal education. The peculiarity of local conditions here

precludes the use of identical standards. For instance, the standard used in the United

States that the compensation of the faculty should not depend on the number of students

or on the fees received is much too visionary. Our law schools do not enjoy the generous

endowments and bequests with which American law schools are blessed. Take the case

of Harvard Law School as an example. In the Dean's Report for the last academic year, itis stated that the aggregate amount of bequests for the academic year 1959-1960 was US

$ 1,080,000. Where in the Philippines, may we ask, do we have such a windfall, either

for one law school or for all our law schools? If the argument is that people are not

inclined to be charitable in view of the well known fact that most private law schools are

organized as stock corporations, why - may it be asked - don't we have such a

manifestation of generosity even for the College of Law of the University of the

Philippines?

Yet, despite the multitude of handicaps that beset our system of legal education there

are some redeeming features that furnish hope for the future. A system of legaleducation that has produced across the years distinguished leaders of thought and action,

a system of legal education that has bred presidents, judges and solons that have all

affected the national stream and shaped the nation's destiny cannot be entirely destitute

of merit.

For consider these: First, it is in the law schools of the nation that we find a sense of

participation in the great, crucial issues of the day. In the classrooms of the different

schools of law, bright students rising above the level of mediocrity examine, with the

help of their mentors, the flow of events in the world and realize their involvement in

everyone of them. They are the first to see the maladies that afflict the body politic and

they realize the seemingly insuperable obstacles that stand in the way of a just and clean

government. They look at their own sophisticated age and at the troubled world in which

they live and they begin to wonder whether the rules of law designed to establish a just

and lasting social order can prevail over so much suspicion and fear and over the forces

of greed and selfishness. Today, probably more than ever before, the current of rapid and

disturbing events has sharpened their interests and excited their intellectual curiosity. In

classes in constitutional law, in seminars in international law and in day-to-day

discussions on various subjects, alert students expect their teachers to devote some time


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to the burning and relevant issues of the present. I see in all this the desire to be released

from the crippling hold of concepts and a wish to actively participate in the stream of

history.

This is all for the good.

Second: whatever the nation owes to the legal system it owes in great measure to the

band of dedicated, patient and unselfish teachers of law who, in their own quiet way,

have shaped the thinking and the convictions of their students. Some of these teachers

are full-time mentors, others, on a part-time engagement, have brought to their teaching

the wealth of their experience and wisdom. He is a rare teacher who does not find in the

classroom an excellent opportunity to develop new thoughts and ideas and through his

analysis of both abstract and concrete problems, help shape the thinking of the future

leaders of the land. There is today, if I am correct in my observation, a growing ferment

in our law schools. Keen, enterprising teachers of law are staging a quiet but potent

revolt against the old school of thought that looks at rules of law as self-contained and

self-sufficient, requiring no insight into the social sciences and the other disciplines for

their nourishment. Students of law are now being exposed to what I might call a more

realistic, because functional, treatment - a treatment that correlates law with the actual,

day-to-day problems of living. Hence, law and economics, law and sociology, law and

psychology, law and philosophy are being paired off and integrated in a manner that lifts

law study from a mere exercise of memory into an intellectual, rational pursuit befitting

men devoted to the idea of developing a regime of ordered liberty. Whatever may be said

of our teachers of law - many of whom are unfortunately teaching on part-time basis and

whose duties usually constitute a drain upon their energies and resources as teachers -

this cannot be denied: that it is by reason of the devotion of a good number of them,

their experience and competence in their respective lines and their broad outlook upon

life that our law schools have attained the kind of prestige they enjoy in this country.

Third: The type of selective admission now administered by the law schools by virtue

of the A.B. or B.S. requirement prescribed by the Supreme Court may, as we all expect,bring in a new generation of law students with a relatively better background in the

social and natural sciences, equipped with a better appreciation of history, with the

facility of expressing themselves clearly and logically and possessed of a deeper insight

into the economic and social problems of our age. It is of course expected that by reason

of the time and expense involved, a good number of those desiring to take law for a

career will be discouraged and enrolment will decrease considerably. However, what we

are bound to lose in quantity we hope to be able to recover in terms of quality.

Undoubtedly, the decrease in enrolment will adversely affect many schools, particularly

those that have no connection with established universities. Already, many law school


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administrators are thinking of shutting down their schools the moment their enrolment

sinks to a certain level. This unhappy development will naturally affect the teaching

profession in more ways than I can describe. This lamentable consequence will

somehow be offset by the following expected developments:

(1) a more favorable faculty-student ratio conducive to a higher level of legal

scholarship and insuring actual personal acquaintance of the faculty with the whole

student body;

(2) the building up of a faculty with a greater number of full-time teachers, devoting

their entire time to teaching and research, with professorial lecturers supplementing the

regular faculty, particularly in courses on Remedial Law;

(3) greater opportunity for students to make use of the plant and physical facilities of

the school; and

(4) more reasonable teaching loads with plenty of time devoted to research and

authorship.

Fourth: Sensing the impossibility as yet of divorcing the bar examinations from the

content of the law curriculum and the method of instruction, those in authority have felt

the need for bar reforms. One reassuring development is that the Supreme Court, in

recent years, has laid stress on practical problems and hypothetical cases testing the

examinee's capacity for expression and his use of logical processes of thought, instead ofquestions that merely call for the use of memory. Also, questions now are becoming

more and more representative instead of being concentrated on one or two portions of a

subject. What we probably need now, as one distinguished judge observed, is a formal

statement of basic standards or principles for the use and guidance of future examiners

and the law schools of the country, in the interest of desirable stability.

What, then, does the future have in store for legal education in this country? I submit

that the emergence of a new type of students - as distinguished from the various

categories of students we had just after liberation, some of whom could not secure

ample documentation of their educational attainment as a result of the widespread loss

of school records - will inspire, if it has not already inspired, a new kind of thinking and

teaching in our law schools.

Law professors will continue to teach law but knowing they cannot teach all the laws,

in view of the proliferation of statutes and cases. However, it is not exactly what they

teach - which is also important - but how they teach that will really matter. They will

teach not merely to impart and inform, but to inspire; they will teach not to smother the

spirit of inquiry but to awaken and sharpen it; they will teach not to burden and confuse

the student with numberless details and minutiae but to train the mind to perceive and


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analyze, to come to grips with the very heart of a problem and make a rational judgment

after examining all the relevant facts and considering all the possible alternatives; they

will teach not to stifle but help develop clear minds, open curious minds ready to

embark upon the lonely but fascinating adventure of earnest contemplation; they will

teach not primarily for the pay they get - though that is obviously an important

consideration - but like all the great teachers before them, for the enduring satisfaction

of having contributed the very best part of their lives toward the cultivation of the

intellect and the illumination of the spirit.

The typical school of law will cease to be just a place for professional training but a

center of true scholarship, leading students to the joy and responsibility of learning.

Schooled in the liberal tradition of civility, they will realize more acutely than theirpredecessors that far more important than the making of a living is the living of a life

and that one cannot be a good lawyer unless he first be a good man. As I stated

elsewhere, these are the students who know that new questions have to be asked again

and again, even if no readymade answers are available. These are the students who will

have the breadth of outlook, the range of vision, the generosity of spirit and the

sharpened sensitivity to the needs of their fellowmen which a purposeful education

generates. They are the students who will realize that intensive specialization - whether

in corporation law or international law, in civil law or remedial law - can only be

meaningful within the framework of the good life in a free society.Just as law schools will be centers of scholarship, they shall continue to be effective

training grounds for leadership, where students will try to seek answers to the pressing

social, economic and moral needs of the community. They will consider their place in

society in the light of the long, uphill struggle of Man for survival. We expect these

students not to slam the windows of their mind against the world, for it is one they

cannot just ignore. With clear intellect, they will see that what happens in one part of the

world cannot but affect the fate of peoples everywhere and that the greatest problem of

this troubled nuclear age, namely, the preservation of peace and civilization, based on

respect for the dignity and worth of the human personality, is a problem that will requirethe very best of their thinking, their talents and their resources.

When, as Dean George Malcolm happily anticipated yesterday, the centennial of the

College of Law of this University is celebrated in the year 2010 A.D., it shall be our

wish that the contribution of Philippine legal education in the second half of the century

shall have far exceeded the expectations embodied in this forecast and that the lawyers

produced by the various law schools of the country shall have excelled their forebears in

the quality of their dedication to "the greatest of all sciences, the science of justice and

the greatest of all arts, the art of adjusting the rights of men." *

legal education in the philippines

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