Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Legal Education in the Philippines: An Appraisal and A Forecast
By 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.
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 fulltime 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 fulltime teachers to parttime teachers
but there is little dispute that parttime 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 prebar reviewers are the most favored commodities; the
students feel secure with answers that are as certain as they are simple and the more
dogmatic 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,
evergrowing 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 distilled
information 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 nonbar
subjects 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 lawyerdominated 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 fouryear degree in arts or sciences as a prerequisite to admission in the
law school is of course bound to produce farreaching 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, it
is stated that the aggregate amount of bequests for the academic year 19591960 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 legal
education 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 daytoday
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 fulltime mentors, others, on a parttime 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 selfcontained and
selfsufficient, 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,
daytoday 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 parttime 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 facultystudent 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 fulltime 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 of
questions 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 their
predecessors 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 require
the 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." *