1

A STUDY ON THE LEGAL PROFESSION:

A PERSPECTIVE

By

Manuel F. Bonifacio and Merlin M. Magallona

While we are in no way depreciating the social significance of the other

professions, we venture to say that the legal profession is one of the most critical
professions in society today. It is critical because it is the one vested by society
with the expertise and status to deal with the problems of stability and progress
through normative process. It is in particular concerned with the problems of
rights and justice in society. Lawyers as judges are given the legitimate authority
to define what is right and just in disputes or conflicts arising from members of
society. As legislators, lawyers are vested with the function of promulgating rules
which many times lead to the restructuring of society.

The lawyers are expected to be responsible for the effective distribution

of justice and for insuring that the rights and privileges of people are not unduly
interfered with. In other words, they are concerned with safeguarding justice so
that discrimination and various types of social injustices are avoided. Thus, the
legal profession is most directly concerned with the problems of the normative
order in society. In other words, it is normatively oriented. By this we mean it is
most involved in the establishment and protection of the various norms (rules)
necessary for the stability of society through time. It is intimately involved in
determining the most appropriate means by which social order becomes
possible. Added to this is its concern for rules that would most effectively allow
society to carry out its most important functions. Consequently, it is concerned
with the problems of social control by seeing to it that those who willfully violate
the normative order are meted out appropriate sanction. The scale of justice that
is usually taken as a symbolic representation of the profession dramatizes the
awesome social responsibility reposed on lawyers who, in professional
actuations, set into motion a normative system and accordingly lays down the
concrete basis for the decision and action of the public.

LEGAL EDUCATION FOR THE 1980’s:

Report of the Committee on Legal Education of the Supreme Court of the Philippines
February 21, 1980, Diliman, Quezon City
 2

On the basis of the foregoing, we can see that the legal profession is
likewise concerned with the problem of social control. Social control not in terms
of direct exercise of police power but more in terms of defining and legitimately
deciding on whether a given act is legal or not. We know for a fact that this is not
arbitrarily arrived at by a lawyer but is always in consonance with the legal
system. In this connection, the lawyer is the one who is given the legitimate
authority to interpret the action of an individual in terms of its significance or
implication in the legal system. Thus, the additional important function of
lawyers is in terms of interpreting the interrelationship between the legal order
and the specific action of a person. As a general rule, the action of a person must
cohere with the legal framework of action otherwise it becomes illegal and many
times it would be met by an appropriate punishment. It is perhaps in this area of
social control where the legal profession is most sensitive because legal
interpretation of acts and events is always a human act and many times
therefore is subject to human limitation.

Because of the direct link between the legal processes and the normative
structure of society, the social awareness of lawyers together with their attitude
to critical social issues is important. In comparison to all other professions it is
rather fair to assume that the legal profession should be the most concerned with
the various changes occurring in society, since it deals with the ever changing
human affairs in all variegated forms. Perhaps the lawyer should be very similar
to a sociologist and should be a very keen observer and commentator of social
events. This no doubt makes the legal profession the most demanding and
challenging. Lawyers are not only expected to possess commitment to legal
responsibility but at the same time they must be morally responsible because
they can be instruments for the perpetuation of a given social order and in fact
the best legitimizer of it. However, they can also be an important instrument for
the transformation of a given social order. To us the legal profession must keep a
delicate balance between these two poles. This is the most critical dilemma that
confronts our lawyers today. They are caught in the tension between the stability
of the social order and the progressive transformation of it. Because of the
lawyer’s concern for the greater good, he has no option in this regard but to be

LEGAL EDUCATION FOR THE 1980’s:

Report of the Committee on Legal Education of the Supreme Court of the Philippines
February 21, 1980, Diliman, Quezon City
 3

bold and daring to challenge the existing order when it becomes necessary in the
interest of justice. In this connection, the legal profession assumes a critical role
in social development. It must be directly involved in legal innovations in order
to ensure that justice and human rights are properly distributed, protected, and
advanced in society. To what extent are lawyers actually keeping such a delicate
balance between reinforcing and transforming the existing legal order for the
greatest good? What is the distance between laws on paper and laws as actually
implemented, particularly those relating to rights and benefits affecting the
broad majority of people? What actual guarantees does the legal profession
extend to the disadvantaged and oppressed in society? What is the role of
lawyers in case positive law comes into conflict with objective justice? To what
extent are lawyers co-opted by the moneyed class in society and to what extent
are their legal interpretations and decisions influenced by the dominant class in
society? These are just a few of the critical questions confronting the legal
profession today.

The foregoing considerations have direct implications on legal education

and recruitment in general. A significant question to be raised in this regard is to
what extent does the intellectual preparation of future lawyers in the country
today confront the existing problems relating to human rights and social justice.
Does legal education incorporate in the socialization of future lawyers legal
issues related to societal change and development? As pointed out earlier, how
do law schools respond to the delicate balance between conformity and advocacy
for change in the interest of the greater good? These questions are important in
view of the direct link between legal system and the normative order of society.
How the prospective lawyers are to be trained will have direct bearing on their
future role in supporting and designing the legal framework of society.

An equally critical challenge is addressed to continuing legal education in

terms of parallel questions and to what extent are the competencies of lawyers
actually improved through such programs. To us it is in such a program where
the most current and relevant legal issues are brought to the surface and should
be taken as the sources of new insights to legal problems and probable

LEGAL EDUCATION FOR THE 1980’s:

Report of the Committee on Legal Education of the Supreme Court of the Philippines
February 21, 1980, Diliman, Quezon City
 4

improvement, change and introduction of new courses in the field of legal

education. It is actually in the continuing legal education where we find the
direct and real interaction between law and society. It is here where greater
social consciousness and social responsibility are brought to bear on the
practicing lawyers so that they become actively involved in supporting as well as
in challenging the existing legal framework. It is also here where innovative legal
strategies are developed so that the legal order is always in line with the
requirements of the larger community.

Critical as these problems are, they appear in Philippine society in ever

sharper relief. They acquire more significance in the context of specific social
conditions of the country. Accordingly, they project a greater social
responsibility on the part of the legal profession to develop self-awareness as to
its critical function in society and to evaluate the social and political
consequences of its work on the quality of life as experienced by the broadest
ranks of the people.

In a society where about seventy per cent of the population are below the
poverty line and where the people remain uninformed of basic rights and
freedoms by reason of mass illiteracy, the pursuit of law and order, which is
merged in the function of the legal profession, can only succeed at the price of
great social injustice. Again, in a society which operates on the basis of market
conditions, the legal profession has to face the obstacle of its services gravitating
toward the interests of the economically dominant groups which can well afford
the price tag. Inevitably, the legal profession goes through a process of alienation
away from the demands of justice on the side of the economically disadvantaged
and the socially oppressed. Thus, it is not by subjective intention of lawyers but
by structural constraints built into the social framework that class justice
prevails in a society where legal services are made available in the nature of
commodities for sale in the open market, resulting in the contradiction between
the avowed public function of the legal profession in theory and its narrow
private orientation in actual practice.

LEGAL EDUCATION FOR THE 1980’s:

Report of the Committee on Legal Education of the Supreme Court of the Philippines
February 21, 1980, Diliman, Quezon City
 5

In Philippine context, there is a more compelling reason which

underscores the social responsibility and importance of the legal profession. We
refer to the fact that ignorance of the law on the part of the broad masses of
people is a historically-established phenomenon. Writers on the development of
law in Continental Europe and in the Anglo-American tradition speak of law as
an expression of the culturally rooted values of the people, which evolved in the
very fabric of social life in the course of their long historical experience. In this
sense, it is said that the legal system takes its main content from a “common law”
which has grown with the people, and it could be assumed that law forms part of
the general customary knowledge of the people. If at all that is true in other
countries, the Filipino masses are not so fortunate. The truth is that the law did
not grow with the Filipino people; instead they were made to grow into the law.

Law is a foreign body in the indigenous social life, forming part of a

forcible intrusion of colonial rule. It is a wholesale implantation of norms
conceptualized as the basis of social relations belonging to the peculiar
experience of foreign communities at their own stage of historical development.
No student of the Philippine legal history can escape the striking fact that the
development of the legal system comes through the elaboration of private law
contained in the Spanish Civil Code and of public law transplanted from the
American constitutional framework, a process which has obliterated the nascent
“legal system” at the time of direct colonial administration. In a more profound
sense, therefore, the Filipino masses do not know the law not only because it is of
alien origin, but also because it is propagated and regenerated in a foreign
language, within a conceptual framework far removed from the experiential
understanding of the broad ranks of the people. This legal continuity is
perpetuated and runs parallel to the interest of the people without a significant
point of tangency, and draws its materials only out of the problems of the small
circle of elite.

This basic ignorance of the law on a broad social scale enhances the social
function of the legal profession as a repository of legal knowledge and
interpretation, and as a medium of communication of rights and freedoms in

LEGAL EDUCATION FOR THE 1980’s:

Report of the Committee on Legal Education of the Supreme Court of the Philippines
February 21, 1980, Diliman, Quezon City
 6

relation to the people. But it is in this light too that the anomaly of the legal
profession becomes more glaring as its increasing alienation takes it farther
away from its social function.

This perspective on the legal profession constitutes the basis on which to

find a need to examine its many dimensions in order to identify and throw light
on the key problems, and propose some approaches toward making the
profession a more active force in the advancement and administration of a
socially meaningful system of justice in the country today.

-ooOoo-

LEGAL EDUCATION FOR THE 1980’s:

Report of the Committee on Legal Education of the Supreme Court of the Philippines
February 21, 1980, Diliman, Quezon City