I often find myself encouraging people to study law and become a lawyer. I am that type. Despite obvious limitations of law which became more apparent when I eventually started practising in 2006 (I qualified for the Philippine Bar in 2007 but I started working in a firm a year before), I still believe in law’s nobility and its immense capacity to affect in a positive way, the lives of my clients, students, and everyone in general.
My love affair with law was not easy. I would often describe it as an acquired taste – something that I got used to over time. When I started studying law at UP in 2002, I often found myself frustrated on how unintelligible law is. I had an economics degree and had an ardent desire for graphs, proofs, and even mathematical equations. Law is quite the opposite. It is too verbose, which made it so difficult to chew, and the taste is not even worth the chewing. But like a thief in the night, law eventually found its way into the back door, and made a dwelling within me. And the main reason for this is that I have come to appreciate law’s immense capacity to affect people’s lives in a very personal way. I think the cases I read in Constitutional Law – especially on human rights and social justice – made the workings of law so real, thus finally intelligible.
I now consider myself a specialist in private international law, comparative law, civil law and procedure. I have endured 11 years of law studies – 4 years of JD, 1 year of LLM, 4 years of PhD in Law and 2 years of Diploma in Law (this degree would allow me to practise law here in Australia). I have taught law for 7 years now in Australia and the Philippines. I practised law for 8 years in the Philippines and Indonesia, and I look forward to practising again soon here in Australia. I think only a love for law could have sustained that.
My advice to law students is to take law in all of its totality – all the good and bad, the ugly and beautiful, its majesty and travesty. Only a full immersion in law – and this can only be done if one studies his law very well – can one know fully well what law is. Like any love story, this means that one must devote time and energy in knowing the law. One should also strive for clarity, always yearning to find the framework and logic that the law follows. Furthermore, one must know how to apply the law on different situations – will the law still apply if the car’s colour is different? What is the fact that the law defines as relevant or operative?
Being able to identify legally relevant facts then, is a very important skill that every student of law should master. In this sense, law defines the facts that one needs to scrutinise – the lens through which lawyers should see reality (I always emphasise this to my students!).
Nonetheless, beyond knowing and being able to apply the law, one must also think critically of the law. Is this a good law? How do we know what is good law? If law is the lens, does it give us a myopic or distorted vision? Even if this is a good law, how do we ensure that its application is correct? How does it relate with other laws? Is being considered good for the majority good enough? Because law is embedded in culture, history, and politics, what do these extraneous factors say about the law that we are examining?
Critical thinking also often requires unpacking one’s own assumptions and becoming conscious of one’s own prejudices. Knowing the law, being able to apply it, and being able to think critically about it are the key skills which I consider important if one wants to flourish as a lawyer. But again, these could only be possible because one had fallen in love with law in the first place. (LL)
(Note: Lemuel Lopez recently received his PhD in Law from the University of Melbourne, with his thesis being cited to have made an important contribution to the field of cross-border litigation in Asia. He is spending the mandatory lockdown in Melbourne with his 2 year-old son who insists that karaoke is a much a better way of spending time than for his tatay studying cross-border insolvency law. Dr. Lopez is an Australian Leadership Awardee.—Ed.)
