When people are treated badly in institutions, they are not necessarily doing it on purpose. Everyone does things the right way. Each person points to the right paragraph in the right file. In the middle, a group of people—in this case, 17 law graduates—end up having to deal with the effects of a crisis that none of them caused.
That’s basically what the Brickfields Asia College LPQB lawsuit was about. And on July 28, the High Court threw it out.
Brickfields Asia College, which is just called BAC in Malaysian legal education circles, had fought the Legal Profession Qualifying Board’s decision to not let 17 of its graduates take the Certificate in Legal Practice exam. These were not students who didn’t do their work. They had originally signed up for BAC’s UK Degree Transfer Programme, which is a way for students to go to a British university to finish their last year of law. After March 2020, the world came to an end.
Because of travel restrictions, the students couldn’t study abroad. Instead, they transferred their credits to the University of London’s external degree program and finished their last two years in Malaysia while taking exams graded in the UK. At the time, it looked like a good way to get around the problem. In his affidavit, BAC managing director Raja Singham admitted that the pandemic had made many people’s finances worse, and that sending students abroad was not only hard to do, but also too expensive for many families.
LPQB, on the other hand, had a different view. When 17 of those students later tried to take the CLP exam, even though they had at least a second-class lower degree, the board said they were not allowed to. The reason was that their program had become a “new program” that had never been officially recognized by the CLP’s rules for eligibility. The rules said that the last year had to be spent in the UK. These kids hadn’t done that. End of sentence.
You can understand the board’s point of view even if you don’t agree with it completely. Regulatory bodies need consistency; changing eligibility rules for each case leads to problems with precedent. But it seems like no one in charge had thought to ask what should happen when a pandemic makes a requirement that was always seen as absolute unnecessary.
The BAC asked the Kuala Lumpur High Court for a judicial review on February 13, 2024, and wanted the LPQB to force the students to sign up for the exam. The college also said that the program transfer cost them RM3.3 million, and they had already refunded RM259,000 in tuition fees to the 17 students who were affected.
Judge Alice Loke Yee Ching of the High Court didn’t rule on the main points of BAC’s case at all. For lack of time, the college had missed the three-month window to file for judicial review, so she threw out the case. On August 29, 2023, the LPQB made its final decision. BAC filed after almost six months. That window is firm under Malaysian law. BAC had to pay RM15,000 in costs, the court said.
The judge also said that the LPQB had done what the law allowed it to do, that its decision was neither irrational nor illegal, and that BAC or its students had not been given any information that would have led them to believe they would be eligible for the CLP. The board was created by the Legal Profession Act of 1976, so it is legally its job to make and explain its own rules. The court wasn’t going to question that.
After the decision, a BAC spokesperson made it clear that the decision does not affect other students in the UKTL or UOL programs. This probably didn’t make the 17 graduates who were directly affected feel better. Before the decision was made, Raja Singham had already said that BAC would pay £8,000 of the students’ UK Bar exam fees if the judicial review failed. Yes, it did.
As you watch this happen, it’s hard not to notice what’s missing from the official record: any way to deal with unusual situations. There was no way around the pandemic. It was a real breakdown of normal circumstances. However, the legal system didn’t provide any way out, not even a short-term one, for students who tried their best to deal with situations they had no control over.
It’s worth thinking about whether that gap is caused by a flaw in the way policies were made or by the fact that regulatory systems are too rigid to be changed. There was a court case. The rules worked the way they were written. But for 17 graduates in Malaysia who spent years working to become lawyers, the ruling is more of a personal loss than a matter of procedure.
