Professor Azmi Sharom’s article , with regret, misses the point. Justice Sri Ram's attack is on the intellectual quality and legal knowledge of law graduates from local universities (the hiring partners of most of the established law firms in the country would agree with him) and not just that they do not have enough practical skills.
The professor's argument that the nine-month pupilage training is inadequate and partly to be blamed is no doubt a shared opinion of the profession but one thing is very obvious - while the pupilage training is equally inadequate for all graduates, foreign-trained law graduates still learn better, faster and turn out to be more competent lawyers than their local counterparts by a wide margin.
All law graduates lack practical skills - but while many among the foreign graduates manage to acquire these skills quickly and confidently, many local graduates end up being seen as jokers. If the oven is the same but not all cakes are baked equally well, you would have to doubt the quality of the flour, ingredients and the mixing in those half-baked ones.
I believe this is because foreign-trained law graduates are generally not spoon-fed by their teachers and have really been taught to think on their own feet. They have also been exposed to more complex thinking exercises than the locals. Indeed, this deficiency of the local universities seem to cut across the board in all non-science/math subjects, not just law.
The point is this - if you are intellectually defective, even nine years of pupilage will not make you a good lawyer. Many lawyers believe that local graduates cannot be 'helped' in that sense.
A common Bar exam for all law graduates is the only way to convince the other members of the profession and the general public that local graduates are on par with the foreign ones. If we do not trust our secondary schools enough to let them determine the academic standards of their own students internally (but want to make all students prove their competence by passing SPM instead), why should we trust our local universities enough to let them determine internally who is or is not good enough to be a lawyer? (instead of holding them to a common, external, objective standard)?
The professor also attacks the abuses in the CLP system and uses that as a justification for not having a common Bar exam. On the other hand, he is confident that ‘a student passes on his or her merit’ at the local university, and ‘Exam scripts are sent to external assessors comprising both local and foreign academics and practitioners to ensure fairness and quality’.
If they truly have merit as the professor claims, I am very sure that they will definitely pass any common Bar exam with flying colours. Why not make them sit for it so that it is fair and equal for all law graduates?
The CLP exam board is such a disgrace because of quotas and the lack of transparency and accountability. Unlike the professor's confidence in the local universities (as if each and every one of them is on par with the University of London), no institution would ever be perfect - we just need more supervision and accountability for this exam body to make sure that the common Bar exam is respectable.
On the other hand, supervision and accountability are very much lacking in local universities - and most of us do not share the professor's confidence. Besides, it would be easier to supervise one exam body compared to the many largely autonomous law faculties of our local universities.
Indeed, the fact that even the professor himself agreed that the local graduates are of inadequate quality makes his confidence in the 'merit' of local graduates a self-contradiction. Either they need an 'improvement' in their education or they can proudly put Oxbridge law graduates to shame (hence you don't need to 'improve' anything).
A common Bar exam for all - however imperfect - will forever be a fairer system and will generate more public confidence than the ‘One profession, two entrances’ method we are having now. Above all, to be fair to the really competent local graduates and to allow them a chance to remove their stigma, let them pass whatever exams others are passing, so that no 'bulldogs' - or tigers or dinasours for that matter - could ever tar their quality with a broad brush again.
