THE LEGAL FRONT

By JUSTICE ART. D. BRION (RET.)

Some lawyers who read my column last week (Legal Educaltion Problems and Issues) were dismayed when I attributed our dismal Bar exam results to problems traceable to both law students and law teachers. They ask how and why their colleagues can be blamed when they all passed the Bar exam and should therefore qualify as teachers of law.

Their questions apparently misunderstand the role of the Bar exam in relation to the law teaching profession. The Bar exam’s focus is on qualifying candidates for the practice of law, not for the teaching of law. Teaching law is an altogether different discipline; it requires its own set of professional skills that are not tested through the Bar exam.

To effectively teach law, a teacher must ideally have knowledge beyond the general knowledge of law that entry-level law practice requires. He must be able to command attention in his classroom, communicate and impart knowledge, and inspire his students to learn.

As an example, Constitutional Law – a subject that touches our lives as citizens – must be handled by a teacher whose knowledge has been enriched by specialized studies, hands-on practice, and real world experience.

He should have a good command, not only of black-letter constitutional law, but also of jurisprudential developments and their nuances. He must be able to guide law students through the legal analysis needed by situations deviating from the cut-and-dried examples that textbooks offer. All these, the teacher must masterfully impart and communicate to induce students to learn.

Lawyers do not generally acquire this level of expertise by simply passing the Bar exam. Deeper knowledge of the law is usually acquired through graduate studies degree in law, through experience in relevant law-related positions, or through years of teaching experience.

These realities perhaps led the Legal Education Board (LEB) to require that law deans must at least have a masteral degree in law, while teachers of law should ideally have either a graduate degree, 10 years of teaching experience, or professional expertise due to their work or as book authors.

I observe in this regard, however. that law graduate programs, even those taught by reputable graduate schools (yes, there are fly-by-night graduate schools and programs out there), may not be enough to raise the level of teaching competence since their focus is largely on the law; they seldom deal with the instructional methods that teachers need to effectively discharge their educational responsibilities.

Thus, if a masteral student learns about the craft of teaching at all, the knowledge arises from the instructional methods that he saw, used, or imbibed during his masteral studies; that he read and researched on, on his own; or that he learned by actual experience.

Significantly, not many law schools engage in faculty development or in assisting teachers develop their fullest potentials as educators.

As a result, teachers in some law schools simply plow through their assigned textbooks, adding nothing of their own to what these books facially say. Some come to class without any teaching plan or personally prepared syllabus. Many teachers do not at all expose their students to the analysis of law that these students would later need in the real world.

Not many law schools, too, stress the need for the continuous updating that the dynamic character of the law requires, nor provide the basic research and teaching materials that students and their teachers need. The LEB, in fact, has to compel some law schools to update their library facilities.

In the usual course, therefore, the difference between the qualified and the deficient teachers of law is determined by their individual preparation for the academic life, acquired from law school, from advanced law studies, from related legal experience, or from efforts they undertook on their own.

This kind of situation gives law schools from the bigger urban areas a decided edge because of the richer pool of academically prepared or experienced lawyers they can choose from. This reality is evident from the LEB’s listing of the top 10 law schools for 2019, most of which are based in Manila and the major urban centers where expertise abounds.

Despite this advantage, the Bar performance of law schools in urban centers still noticeably vary. Other factors are obviously at play here. One reality from the teaching side is the relative paucity of top teaching talents who can be shared among the many law schools in the urban centers.

In other words, in some areas, there may be more law schools than the number of qualified teachers can support.

This shortfall must necessarily be filled by newer teachers or by those with lower levels of expertise who, unless they receive further training or gain more experience, obviously cannot approximate the results delivered by the top performers.

This imbalance presents a live question that the LEB and our other policymakers must address.

Another sad characteristic of Philippine legal education is the paucity of full-time professional teachers and of those who have rightfully earned – by academic preparation and experience – the title of “professor.” Incidentally, the use of this title, even by those beginning to teach law, should be discouraged in order to give full meaning and import to the hard-earned professorial rank.

Note in this regard that Philippine law teachers are mostly part-timers; they teach only in the evenings or on Saturdays after completing their regular work for the day or for the week. The time that part-timers devote to class preparation expectedly varies, depending on how much time they can spare after attending to their regular work and their personal needs.

Even full-time law school deans are rarities. Some deans also actively teach, thus further lessening the time they devote to law school management. A law school is likewise lucky, or may be a top-tier school, if it has a full set of administrative staff supporting the dean and the faculty.

How and to what extent our educators’ diffused focus and our law schools’ inadequate interest in faculty development contribute to our present problem is beyond the scope of this article to fully discuss.

I can say for now, though, that the contribution of these teacher-side deficiencies is not puny. The extent can already be gauged from the Bar exam whose results heavily depend on the educational inputs of our teachers.

I hope that our policymakers shall at some point discuss and address the concerns I described, for the sake of our law students and the legal education and justice systems we hope to see. [email protected]