Ahmad Rais T.

Undug
LLB-4
Legal Counseling and Social Responsibility

A Place at the Table

Redefining legal social responsibility through increased openness to the assimilation of foreign
legal developments and innovations into our evolving legal system

During my sophomore year in law school, I asked one of my law professors whether it
was likely that same-sex marriage would be legalized in the Philippines in the foreseeable
future. It had been a few weeks after the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah ruled in
Kitchen v. Herbert1 that the state’s ban on same-sex marriages was unconstitutional, and hopes
were high in the United States that the ruling would eventually snowball into federal support. 2

The reply I got was unequivocal. “Not any time soon,” my professor said. “We’re not
ready for it.”

Whether her answer betrayed a conviction that the state has legitimate reasons for
discouraging both homosexuality and same-sex marriage was not what bothered me. What was
more unsettling, really, was her subsequent refusal to discuss the implications of the Kitchen
ruling on the development of the Philippine legal system. When I attempted to pursue a
discussion on the matter, her simple reply was, “Our laws are clear – only a man and a woman
may contract marriage.”

There lies the rub. As much as has been said about the Philippine legal system being left
behind by advancements in technology and economic openness, our main problem lies
elsewhere – we are taught (and somehow end up believing) that the body of laws we study and
practice is indefeasible, incontrovertible even. Thus many of us become seemingly afraid of the
“foreign” and end up unwilling to advocate the assimilation of legal developments from other
jurisdictions into our legal system.

As members of a profession that deals with human lives and rights, our approach to
fulfilling our responsibility to society should be founded on the premise that the legal system is
more than just the application of codes and technicalities. Law students and lawyers should
realize that the study and practice of law is a means of adapting to changing times; corollarily,
there is a need for us to be more open to foreign legal developments and innovations, and to

1
1 961 F.Supp.2d 1181 (D. Utah 2013)
2
Lang, M. (2015, November 19). The little gay-marriage case in Utah that roared and made history. The Salt Lake
Tribune. Retrieved November 20, 2015, from http://www.sltrib.com/specialreports/1693956-155/kitchen-
sbeitymarriage-gay-utah-case
advocate for the evolution of our legal system based on those developments and innovations,
given the increasingly shrinking world we live in.

Advancements in procedure are meaningless without such a shift in thinking, which can
happen only with the introduction of additional legal ethics and MCLE courses that emphasize
the importance of foreign legal breakthroughs in the development of our laws. Most law
schools relegate ethics to one or two courses that focus on rules of professional conduct,
knowledge of which is eventually tested in the Bar Examinations.

The result? Legal ethics without the ethics; expertise in legal codes confined to one
jurisdiction, without any appreciation of the malleability of those codes as a function of global
shifts in ethos. Case in point – our legal experts have a tendency to dismiss developments in the
legal systems of other countries (e.g. same-sex marriage and divorce) as Western concepts
incompatible with our culture and beliefs.3 Our legal training has to reject this way of thinking,
and instead encourage us to assess these developments not for their foreign-ness and
(in)compatibility with our identity, but on the basis of their utility and collective benefit.

This is not to say that culture and tradition have no place in the study and practice of
law. But certainly even the very concepts of culture and tradition are not immune to evolution.
Our transformation into a more interconnected species necessarily implies that culture and
tradition are no longer delineated by geographical and political boundaries. Thus, our social
responsibility as law students and lawyers must necessarily include advocating for a more open
attitude towards foreign legal developments.

There is also another, more compelling, reason why we, as stalwarts of the legal
profession, should exhibit an increased openness to foreign legal developments as a means of
fulfilling our social responsibility. Innovations in the legal landscape have to do mostly with
increasing the scope of protection for human rights, 4 of which universality is a basic
characteristic. This implies that legal developments abroad should bring about similar changes
here. Surely the rights applicable to people on the other side of the world have to apply to us as
well, for at the end of the day are we not also members of the same species?

The ramifications of such a shift in thinking are far-reaching. We stand to benefit from a
generation of lawyers trained to become stalwarts of a fully-evolved, wholly-inclusive legal
system that puts a premium on equal access to rights not just on a domestic level, but on a
global scale.

3
The Philippine Star, p.8.; Licauco de Leon, S. (2014, October 6). The fight to make divorce legal in the Philippines.
Retrieved from http://edition.cnn.com/2014/10/06/world/asia/philippines-legal-divorce-battle
4
Sohn, L. (1983). The New International Law: Protection of the Rights of Individuals Rather Than States. American
University Law Review, 32(1).
 Our concept of a lawyer’s social responsibility can, and must, adapt, but not without us
undertaking the necessary reforms. We have to contemplate the need to transform our entire
enterprise to unsettle deeply resonant conventions of intransigence and resistance. Our legal
system has to transform into one that, instead of excluding, says, “Come and join us. You have a
place at our table.”

Only then can the profession truly redefine itself in a twenty-first century context.