A dignified and respectable law course

When delivering his speech at this year’s opening of the Forensic Year, Chamber of Advocates President Peter Fenech rightly decried how the University of Malta’s law degree has seemingly become a “fallback faculty” for those who need a backup for their first choice courses.

This was not the first warning concerning the lax requirements for anyone wishing to read law at our university. Such requirements had already been too lax before 2014, when entry requirements for the law course became stricter, requiring students to have passes in both English and Maltese.

Those entry requirements had been raised to safeguard the prestige of the legal profession. Back then, the situation was such that it had made the law course the “dumping ground” for students who failed to enter other courses.

Indeed, in 2010, law students had already been calling for more restrictive entry requirements for the university law degree course to remove the perception that it is a “waste bin.”.

As things still stand today, it is absurd and illogical to have several hundred students start the course so freely only for them to fail at a later stage and drop out either due to lack of interest or simply because reading and, eventually, practicing law is not suitable for them.

Also, the still applicable regulation of permitting “mature” students, people over 23, to start the course is unfair. Being a mature student gives significant leeway to applicants who fail to reach the entry requirements but who can still start the course by simply waiting a few years until they are 23 years old.

It is about time entry requirements are tailored to give the opportunity to bright and eager law students to excel. It is not only entry requirements that need to be extensively revised, but also the subjects covered throughout the course.

Unlike today, years ago, saying that studying law wasn’t easy was perhaps an understatement at a time when studying law was super hard and to do it effectively required a combination of good study habits, active learning, and critical thinking.

As an intellectually demanding discipline, there was the need to not only have a deep understanding of complex legal concepts but also the ability to apply them.

Past law students, far less in number, used, of necessity, to navigate a multitude of cases, acts, ordinances, and legal principles while dealing with dense legal texts. As such, passive reading was simply not enough. To remember information much more effectively, they really had to engage with the study material.

We need to transform the law course into one of the toughest courses around again. Law has many challenges. A career in law requires patience, an understanding of ethics, high perception skills, and a strong sense of individuality, among other things.

Regrettably, the poor calibre of students being allowed by our university to read law is undermining the value of the course itself.

A great disappointment and anger can be discerned among veteran established lawyers and members of the judiciary by the quality of the academic and practical professional training that students must complete before starting pupillage to go on to qualify as a practising lawyer.

These last decades, there has been a conspicuous low academic and linguistic level of many law students who shouldn’t have been there. One need only attend some court sittings taking place daily at our law courts to have some adversarial advocacy experience where lawyers of the old school type are not only well-versed in the various laws but also muster great oratory skills coupled with ingenuous interpretative skills of the law as a result of their critical thinking technique learnt during their university years.

It is a pity to watch young lawyer opponents having no grasp of the relevant law and thus not in a position to put forward arguments to counter those of the old school when graduating as a lawyer was quite an honour.

We need to give a signal to those who aren’t up to it that they’re wasting their time and lives.

It’s somewhat unacceptable that the university authorities that set the law course are aware of the problem but have done nothing. Not only, but, from a different perspective, to obtain the warrant to practice as a lawyer, law students who complete their course and have satisfied the statutory period of practical training are made to undergo an ‘aptitude test’, a test badly formulated that is quite irrelevant for its intended ultimate scope and very galling in itself.

Of course, restoring the law course to its former respectable status requires that today’s reality and needs are also taken into consideration.

There are many exciting, well-paid, but highly responsible opportunities for prospective lawyers to fill leading legal roles and positions. EU legislation is just one vast and continuously evolving branch of law that remunerates profusely.

Even in a profession as traditional as law, technology is powerful enough to kill and create a range of roles. Advances in technology mean law graduates have new opportunities to specialise in areas like intellectual property, privacy, and software and business method patents.

Most important of all, however, raising the bar for the law course means that tomorrow’s lecturers within the faculty of law and members of the judiciary picked from the law students, eventually lawyers, being churned out by our university, will enjoy higher standards of competency.