About Abolishing the Bar

I never thought I'd find myself agreeing with Miriam Defensor-Santiago on anything, but last Sunday, a little over twenty-four hours after I learned that I had passed the bar, I found myself doing just that, but only to an extent.

The original tantrum-thrower (and the best one in the game, at that), Miriam has decried the bar as a deceptive and ultimately limited barometer of one's fitness to join the Integrated Bar of the Philippines, and has boldly proposed to junk the bar examinations in favor of a system that will supposedly gauge more accurately one's fitness to practice law. Her idea is to replace the bar exam with a law school aptitude exam that is a bit like the NMAT taken by aspiring medical students before they can get into med school, and a one-year internship.

Even as someone who suffered two years in a row to finally earn my stripes and pass that holy terror of an exam, I have to say that I found myself agreeing with some of her arguments. Indeed, the bar exams tend to ask too much of the examinees, that is to say, they expect the examinee to know everything at one given time. They really do put undue premium on memorization and offer no real demonstration of one's skill in practicing law.

But the extent of my assent kind of stops there, because the system Senator Santiago is proposing just doesn't ring true for me. For one thing, she seems to contradict herself. On the one hand she asserts that her proposed system will help weed out those who are not fit to practice law, but on the other hand she laments how, almost invariably, about two-thirds or more of any given batch of examinees fail it, year in and year out. If a number of people incapable of expressing themselves in the English language or of articulating issues of fact and law are prevented from hurdling the bar, wouldn't this have the same effect as her proposed aptitude test?

For another thing, I think that this proposed initiative, while theoretically rather admirable, and with existing precedent in other countries (e.g. Australia) is not culturally appropriate to the Philippines. It's been lamented that year in and year out, fraternities and powerful segments of the lawyer community conspire to cheat in order to ensure that their young proteges (i.e. brods) make the grade. Miriam's proposal of internship and merely submitting papers only opens the door for more rampant corruption and duplicity.

There are at least 75 law schools that fielded candidates for the last bar exams. Of these, how many UPs or Ateneos or even San Bedas are there? How many, on the other hand, are not afraid to graduate students who are willing to pay a handsome sum for such a privilege, even though they don't deserve it? In a culture where thesis papers, and sometimes degrees, are open-market commodities, it is dangerous to leave in the hands of the schools the determination of whether or not one can be a lawyer. Corruption, even in the academe, is simply to well-entrenched to ignore.

Furthermore, as flawed as it may be, the bar is the only effective existing measure by which the Supreme Court can separate the wheat from the chaff. Take away the qualifying exam and any Tom, Dick or Harry (epsecially those willing to bribe their way through can become a lawyer. Not even the people on the streets see the point in abolishing the bar; they say it's one of the only ways for them to know just how good a lawyer is.

Personally, I vote to keep the exam but to change its format. That's about it, really.