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A backstage pass to the Supreme Court


A review of "Our Rights, Our Victories: Landmark Cases in the Supreme Court" As a lawyer, I found Marites Dañguilan Vitug and Criselda Yabes’s “Our Rights, Our Victories: Landmark Cases in the Supreme Court" (Cleverheads Publishing, 2011) a refreshing breeze blowing the dust off dog-eared pages of venerable high court decisions. The inalienable rights of every citizen need not be constricted to courtroom deliberations and classroom discussions but rather be made openly available to the sovereign Filipino people. Who else better to get the word out to the general public than journalists? As a law student, I almost gave up on pursuing law, not because of the tedium of reading tomes of case decisions, but rather due to the circuitous, opaque and sometimes nonsensical prose of judge-made law. However, one law professor said something in my freshman year that spurred me on with my law studies. He warned his students in class, “Beware the American case decisions; try not to be seduced by the prose." And as he had intended, this was enough to pique the literary interest of many of his students. The language of the law in the Philippines is, after all, English. In courtrooms and law-school classrooms, legal concepts such as “constitutional rights" are articulated in English. US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. had said: “The business of a law school is not sufficiently described when you merely say that it is to teach law or to make lawyers; it is to teach law in the grand manner, and to make great lawyers." Vitug and Yabes dispensed with the grand manner to simply tell the stories of great lawyers, as well as parties to the cases both defeated and victorious, and magisters and public officers who proved to be all too human. Thus, the truth in the telling has become more accessible to the general reading public. Good job. The authors covered 16 landmark cases in a dozen chapters. True to the book-flap blurb, the book is “[w]ritten in clear, popular prose with a minimum of legalese." Candid anecdotes With this book, non-lawyers will hopefully get a better grasp of how the Law can protect one’s rights or show how one can demand these rights to be duly respected. But for lawyers and law students, the book is a backstage pass letting them take a peek at the pathos and comedy playing in the wings and not shown on the official pages of the case decisions. The anecdotal trivia does not distract but rather complements my recollection of these cases which I have read and re-read ad nauseum in attempts to truly and holistically master the jurisprudence. To this day, I still try. This book that’s not a lawbook does help. Here are some of the surprises that leapt out at me from the pages: Chapter 3 was a revelation, if only for the fact that the title of the landmark Flag Salute case perpetuates a typographical error. The petitioner’s name in this case is Embranilag (with an “m") and not, as many lawyers would confidently cite as unassailable authority, Ebranilag . Chapter 5 revealed that one of the petitioners in the Mining Law case had actually named his newborn son “Petitioner" while former UP Law dean and government's current chief negotiator with the Muslim separatists Marvic Leonen had defended the Indigenous People’s Rights Act while keeping amulets in his pocket given to him by leaders of local tribes. Chapter 6 begins with the curious mug-shot of the first death-row convict to be released using the “battered woman syndrome" defense. She was smiling at the camera as the police took her photograph. Chapter 7 gives that eerie detail that the room where the first man executed under the 1987 Constitution had the scent of wild cherries due to an air freshener placed inside. Chapter 10 delivers the postscript that after the motel-chain owner successfully got the high court to junk a city ordinance prohibiting “short time" customers, that same owner turned “born-again" Christian and closed down his motels after exorcising the beds as “altars of sin". Minor oversights I enjoyed “Our Rights, Our Victories" more than Vitug’s previous opus “Shadow of Doubt" and almost as much as retired Justice Isagani Cruz’s “Res Gestae". I attribute this to the fact that unlike the two other books mentioned, “Our Rights, Our Victories" did not dwell too much on the courtroom. I strongly recommend this book not only to those with a legal bent but also to those even slightly interested in figuring out right from wrong. But some observations did not escape me. I noted that the legal eagles cited in the book were identified by the positions and ranks they had held or currently hold. It may have been mere oversight not to mention that when he retired from the Supreme Court, Justice Florentino Feliciano became a Member then later Chairman of the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization. Also, Vitug and Yabes, being non-lawyers, probably are not familiar with the “belief vs. action" dichotomy in freedom of religion jurisprudence. The authors attributed to retired Supreme Court justice Isagani Cruz this legal distinction he made in his own book on Constitutional Law. But that distinction was first made by a United States Supreme Court chief justice way back in 1878. “Freedom of religion means freedom to hold an opinion or belief, but not to take action in violation of social duties or subversive to good order," US Chief Justice Waite wrote in Reynolds v. United States. Appended to the book is the Bill of Rights (Article III, 1987 Constitution). Makes sense, considering that most of the landmark cases dealt with rights of individuals, except for the Charter Change case (Chapter 8) and the Martial Law case (Chapter 12). But not all constitutionally protected rights are found in Art. III, as was pointed out in Chapter 11 regarding the right to a balanced and healthful ecology (Art. II). Students and scholars of the law are still often told to look for other enforceable rights scattered in other constitutional provisions. In Chapter 11, the authors said environmental law maverick Antonio Oposa had told them that he had realized just how appalling the state of Manila Bay pollution was while he was teaching environmental law at the University of the Philippines. But I recall a different story as his former student in the UP College of Law. Prof. Oposa told our class that his students at the Ateneo Professional Schools were the ones who had found out that Metro Manila sewerage mainly goes into Manila Bay. Vitug and Yabes left out of their book other landmark cases which are, by no measure, any less great than the ones they covered. Where is the case of U.S. vs. Bustos which foreshadowed by a few decades the case of New York Times vs. Sullivan regarding criticism of public officials by private citizens? Where are the cases of Jose Burgos Sr. (on the validity of search and arrest warrants) and, decades later, that of his son, Jose Jr. (another writ of amparo case)? Where is the case of David vs. Macapagal-Arroyo on the freedom of assembly after the President declares a state of emergency? How about the latest writs wrought by the high court – the writ of kalikasan and the writ of habeas data? Perhaps a sequel to this volume is necessary. “Our Rights, Our Victories Too: More Landmark Cases in the Supreme Court" – that would definitely be worth the wait. - HS, GMA News
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