EDUCATION-BRAZIL: Too Many Lawyers, Not Enough Quality

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 25 2004 (IPS) - A country with an intense production of sometimes overlapping federal, state and local laws and statutes like Brazil, Latin America’s giant, needs many lawyers.

But the bar association (OAB) complains that there are too many law schools, and that the quality of legal education is often low, with graduates frequently failing to meet the minimum requirements for practicing law.

The OAB believes it is absurd that the National Education Council has authorised 222 new law school programmes for lawyers in the past three years in a country that already has more than 450,000 attorneys – one for every 400 people, higher than the average in the industrialised world.

Annually, 70,000 people graduate with a law degree in Brazil, although not all of them take the bar exam.

”There is not a market for so many lawyers,” the president of the OAB Legal Education Commission, Paulo de Gouvea Medina, told IPS. ”But the worst thing,” he added, ”is the low quality of the education received by the great majority of law students.”

The OAB was successful in its efforts to win a 90-day suspension of the authorisation of new law school programmes, under a Feb. 12 decision by Education Minister Tarso Genro. The criteria applied in approving applications will be reviewed during that three-month period.

The resolution was based on a report which found that of 215 law school courses evaluated by the OAB, only 60 were considered to be of good quality, and were recommended to prospective students by the bar association.

As of January, there were a total of 762 law school programmes in Brazil, according to the Education Ministry. But recent reports indicated that six more programmes were created before the 90-day suspension was put into place, said Medina.

”The disorderly proliferation has occurred in response to economic, not educational, interests,” because the new courses are created by private colleges on the basis of the profit motive, with no regard for the quality of the education they offer, he complained.

The OAB wants the power to veto the authorisation of new courses. Under the current system, it is merely consulted in the process.

The OAB only approved of 19 of the 222 courses created between 2001 and 2003.

But Minister Genro, a successful career lawyer as well as a politician, ruled out that possibility, arguing that it would not be suitable for a professional institution to have decision-making power in the field of education.

There were negative reactions to the OAB’s demands in the National Education Council, which is made up of teachers and professors, and some members said the bar association’s decisions could arise from corporatist interests.

The Council issues recommendations on the applications filed for authorisation of new courses, but the education minister has the final say.

However, it is ”unfair” to accuse the OAB of corporatism, said Medina, because ”it is not merely a professional association, but a public body that by law must defend the quality of legal institutions,” which includes the need for well-trained professionals.

This is a big problem today in Brazil, he said, noting that only 19 percent of the law school graduates who have recently taken the OAB bar exam in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, passed, and only 20 percent in Brasilia, the capital.

Judicial authorities also complain about the quality of education provided by many law schools. Indeed, there is a shortage of judges in this country of nearly 180 million, despite the thousands of law school graduates and lawyers who aspire to become judges, the great majority of whom fail to meet the requirements when a call for candidates is issued.

Besides requiring a certain minimum level of quality, the process of authorising new college programmes should take into consideration the criteria of ”social need”, said Medina, who suggested, for example, that law schools should only be allowed in cities that have a population of more than 100,000 within a 50-km radius.

In the Brazilian hinterland, there are law schools in cities with less than 50,000 inhabitants and few secondary school students, and which lack adequate installations and professors, he noted, blaming the excessive number of law school programmes on the political or economic interests of local authorities and business leaders.

Alberto Guimaraes might be considered one example of the excess of law school graduates in Brazil. He graduated in law in 1982, but supports his wife and two young children driving a taxi in Rio de Janeiro.

For four years, he was a partner in a law practice, ”but it didn’t work out, because it was located in an outlying neighbourhood” where there was little demand for lawyers, he told IPS.

Now he only does ”sporadic legal work,” and for years he has taken the exam to become a prosecutor, and failed. ”I should have done it just after I graduated at age 30,” he laments.

But in Guimaraes’s view, there is no excess of attorneys in the market, because most law school graduates merely go into other professions. ”Of the 60 or 70 who studied with me, only around 20 are practicing law today,” he said.