Why bar exams ruin legal education | Inquirer Opinion

I have a conceit against lawyers from my country not all lawyers but I would say most.
 
Our law school curricula naturally follow the too-long list of prescribed bar subjects. This has destroyed legal education because there is simply no room for anything else, especially with the entire fourth year of law school intended for bar review subjects that are a compressed repeat of the first three. In contrast, law is a three-year program in the United States where one takes the most basic subjects in freshman year. The succeeding years are purely for electives—they presume one does not need exposure to every single field—and some have proposed two-year programs given this.
Philippine law schools must devote three units to the Negotiable Instruments Law. This is a cruel joke because the law was intended for a time when commercial papers were delivered by galleon or stagecoach and that class typically ends with a summary of the brief rules for bank checks, the instrument we far more commonly use today. In contrast to this monumental waste of time, modern, complex laws such as the Intellectual Property and the Securities Regulation Codes are not required reading.
The line of University of the Philippines professors once was that students were there to study law in the grand manner, not review for the bar. Even UP bowed to pressure from alumni fixated on the bar. Equally fixated college seniors were attracted to schools with higher bar passing rates and topnotcher counts. UP did well in both in recent years, but at the staggering cost of eliminating nearly all electives in favor of mandatory bar review classes and stricter grade requirements to remove perceived weaker students before they could affect the all-important bar statistics.
All this has reduced law school to soulless memory games. Our unconscious image of the abogado de campanilla is still an idiot savant who can recite pages of rules verbatim, down to the commas. I remember a progressive Dean Raul Pangalangan holding up a CD of compiled court decisions, then worth about P30,000, to freshmen and reiterating the trivial market value of the memory games.
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