Dear Dean,

I give up. Please consider this as formal notice of my withdrawal from the school’s JD program.

Do not be mistaken—the semester was great. It allowed me to learn more about myself than the intricacies of law. Every case, codal, and commentary I read felt like I was a five-year-old child again, opening my grandparents’ dusty encyclopedia collection. Constitutional law cases were a deep dive into our institutions of government—akin to prying them open, exposing their strengths and weaknesses. Persons and family law cases were tales of relationships gone awry and love gone loveless. Criminal law was a jigsaw puzzle, leaving no minute detail skipped. And statutory construction taught me how to deploy the English language into the battlefield. Indeed, learning the law reinvigorated my love for learning.

“It’s an imperfect system,” said our criminal law professor. True enough, many cases brought dismays—Republic v. Sereno, Ocampo v. Enriquez, and De Castro v. JBC to name a few. Regardless, law school also taught me that imperfect as it may, the system could still crop up a few good things every so often—Senate v. Ermita, David v. Arroyo, and Carpio-Morales v. CA are some of the cases I will look back with pleasure.

But them’s the breaks.

For students like me, hardwork and relishing the daily grind is just half of the heavy lifting. Being a lawyer-in-the making, after all, does not solely depend on one’s intellectual or emotional fortitude to carry on. We live in a material world. We aren’t, in the Platonist sense, in an ideal world where lawyering becomes automatic for anyone who can breeze through the cut-throat recitation, examinations, and retention program.

The shadows of financial insecurity and the lack of adequate, no matter how much I strive, will render this four-year journey treacherous, if not a real risk of falling short at all. The Financial Aid Committee knows this, and I am extremely grateful for the school’s generosity for the full grant.

I can’t help but remember the question propounded by the interviewer (who happens to be my Persons professor): What if your academics suffer, your grades fall short, and you’re stripped of the grant, what will you do? Touché, Dean. The question is moot. I haven’t suffered, fell and been stripped of the grant yet here I am, already regretting everything because matriculation is just a tiny part of the list of expenses one must shell out just to barely live in the Metro, amid rising prices. Factor in that the campus is placed right at the smack of an expensive business district, and the cost of quality legal education skyrockets.

Some say that privilege can only take you so far. But in the law school, privilege could be the deciding factor whether one graduates and gets admitted to the Bar. In this sense, we’re set up inside a system that isn’t simply “imperfect,” but exclusionary and discriminatory. The law student’s salvation for justice and equity are rendered inutile whenever a person who has the capability to learn the law doesn’t have the capacity to access it in the first place.

So, inasmuch as this is a letter of retreat, this is also a letter of apology. I am sorry for failing the Ateneo and the investment it has given me. But just like a bad recitation, I must suck it up and own up to my predicament. Neoliberalism tells me that I have no one else to blame but myself.

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