The WVSU Journal for Law Advocacy (JLA) is an academic journal committed to the development of legal scholarship for and from the Visayas Region and Southern Philippines. The student-run editorial board adheres to a double-blind peer review process as its editorial policy to determine the quality of submission both from law students and legal practitioners.
JLA’s inaugural issue carries the theme “Electoral Laws and the 2022 Philippine Election” and contains seven carefully selected chapters that provide important legal analyses of electoral issues that limit, if not hostage, the conduct of free and fair elections in the Philippines. In preparation of the journal’s official launch by October 1st of 2022, online versions of the seven stand-alone chapters will be shared to the reading public. For this week, JLA is featuring its maiden commentary contributed by Judge Enrique Trespeces of the WVSU College of Law.
The inaugural issue concludes with a commentary on the Clinical Legal Education Program (CLEP) and its relation to ethical-driven lawyering – an important pedagogical improvement in law school curricula that can help bridge the gap between the study of law and practice of law that can help address some of the systemic electoral issues discussed in earlier chapters of the first issue of the Journal.
Entitled “Clinical Legal Education Program and Revised Model Law Curriculum: Championing Law Advocacy and Ethical-driven Lawyering”, Judge Trespeces notes that Revised Model Law Curriculum launched in the last quarter of 2021 now zeroes in on the pressing need for lawyers not only to be practice-ready but ethically-driven as well. He cites his own survey that from 2017 to 2021, 430 bar discipline cases docketed at the Supreme Court, which reflected the “dark side” of lawyering, spread throughout the legal profession. The author argues that the integration of a clinical component of legal and judicial ethics in procedural subjects like criminal procedure, civil procedure in dispute resolution, and evidence rules is a significant enhancement of achieving ethical-driven lawyering.
To illustrate, the editors take note that WVSU College of Law recently integrated its CLEP learning activities into the teaching of the course Administrative Law, Law on Public Officers, and Election Law. This timely integration of CLEP activities to relevant subjects, such as Election Law, coincided with the recently concluded 2022 National Elections. Without a doubt, strategies like this are in accord with CLEP’s goal to inculcate in students’ values of ethical lawyering and public service. Judge Trespeces in his conclusion notes that these initiatives require the concerted efforts of all stakeholders to set the CLEP in motion in order for its objectives to come to fruition.
