A new journey — A Constitional Court?

BEGINNING with today’s column, my byline shall be as Dean, no longer as a retired Justice of the Supreme Court. This is only proper as I now actively work as Dean of the College of Law of San Sebastian College – Recoletos Manila.

Being a part of the academe is not a very big leap as I have been teaching, off and on, through my years as a lawyer. I had also been involved with legal education matters when I was with the court and had been chairman of the 2013 Bar Examinations. Being with the court for almost nine years has given me a post-masteral equivalency in black-letter law, its interpretation and its application.

A new role for me is the administrative task of running a law school. I am not new, though, to administration as I ran the Department of Labor and Employment from 2006 until I was appointed to the court in March, 2008. I have always considered this front line experience with the Cabinet and with our work force and their managements, both here and abroad, to be invaluable in all my subsequent undertakings.

The constant element is my continuing involvement with the law. Aside from teaching law, I intend to continue sharing my thoughts with the public on legal matters through this column and – as soon as I have hurdled my new post’s required learning curve – my active engagement with alternative dispute resolution (ADR).

Thus, the Legal Front shall not change in its format and coverage, except to delve further and deeper into the legal education and alternative dispute resolution matters. I consider ADR as an activity worth pursuing and encouraging as it is an adaptive non-judicial approach perfectly fitted to the litigious society we are becoming or have become.

A Judicial Journey, the book A tradition in the Supreme Court is for a retiring justice to write a book about his tenure with the Court. Many choose to simply compile their most prized opinions and ponencias; some opt for a memoir-type rendering of their judicial accomplishments.

I chose a combination of the two. My retirement book – A Judicial Journey – is a collection of my selected Concurrences and Dissents, supplemented with my comments on the selected opinions, to the extent that these comments do not violate the restriction on the disclosure of what transpired during the court’s internal deliberations. Of course, my quoted dissents, if they hint at all at any judicial engineering that might have transpired, are not covered by this restriction; they are not only official but are part of public records as well.

I released the book on June 11, 2017, the 116th anniversary of the founding of the Supreme Court and the Judiciary. (Copies can be purchased from my publisher, the Central Book Supply.) It received a warm send off in the eyes of some early readers when, in the course of the Judicial and Bar Council’s interview of Supreme Court applicants last June 19, 2017, Justice Angelina Sandoval Gutierrez posed the question: Can you cite cases wrongly decided by the Supreme Court?

A friend in the audience immediately texted me: A question was asked whose answers can be found in your book. Indeed, some of the answers are in the cited dissents in my book. The role of a dissent is precisely to object to the court majority’s ruling and to present the objections and the alternative view based on the dissenter’s discussed reasons. In my book, I cited some of the cases where I believed the court had egregiously erred in its reading of the law or had even abused the discretion reposed on it by the Constitution.

I have to thank retired Justice Gutierrez (whom I replaced in the Supreme Court in 2008) for this wonderful send-off to the book that ended my judicial journey. I might compile another set of my decisions and rulings, but the standard this time would be their usefulness to the law students I now teach.

The new journey My journey into the academic world formally took off on June 21, 2017, when the San Sebastian College of Law opened its doors for the first semester of the school year 2017-2018. My own law studies were with the Jesuits at the Ateneo de Manila College of Law (and later at the Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Toronto, Canada, for my masteral studies). Thus, being at the helm of a Recoletos (Order of Augustian Recollects) law school is a completely new experience for me.

Where the difference lies and how big the difference would be between my old and new academic environments, remain to be seen. The commonality, of course, is obvious: both the Ateneo and San Sebastian College are Catholic schools that teach the law with due consideration for the Catholic faith. This approach is pervasive, hence it is not hard to discern that the commonalities would be greater than whatever differences there might be.

Looking to the future — a Constitutional Court?

As I step into the future, a reality for me is the inevitability of recalling and drawing lessons from the past – from my law practice days, and my days with the Batasang Pambansa, with the DOLE, with the Macapagal Arroyo Cabinet, and with the Judiciary. A matter that belongs to the future but which requires significant inputs from the past, is the amendment of our present Constitution, a matter that sooner rather than later is bound to happen under the Duterte administration.

This exercise cannot but touch the Judiciary and the Supreme Court as they are among our historic pillars of governance. As should similarly be done with other branches of government, their roles and worth to our country’s governance must be evaluated and assessed in the course of reviewing the terms of the Constitution.

One essential question to ask at that point is whether – under the Judiciary’s and the Supreme Court’s present roles and structures – they can still satisfactorily respond to the urgent questions and evolving needs of Philippine society.

Specifically, can the Supreme Court respond as fast, as competently, and as wisely as it should to urgent public questions, without delaying action on the long list of pending cases affecting private interests? The martial law issues, for example, must have intruded into the time that would have otherwise been devoted to other pending matters, such as the equally important Marcos v. Robredo vice-presidential election contest.

Can the court seasonably deliver the well-thought-out constitutional rulings that the nation expects from the highest court of the land, given the current pressures and those that shall build up as the nation grapples with deep problems of sovereignty, continued existence and unity?

Does the present Constitution require the presence of a core of jurists, trained or well-versed in constitutional law, who can deliver the timely quality rulings that can satisfy and earn the respect of the nation for their wisdom and foresight, and serve the country well as an active member of the globalized community of nations?

Should we not have a separate court solely devoted to constitutional issues, unhampered by the continuous flow of private interest cases? Do we need such separate court in light of the problems we have seen and may yet encounter, and in light of the ways and idiosyncrasies of our people and society, of our politics, and of the way we practice democracy in this country?

These are the types of questions that a re-examination of the Constitution can provoke and that should be foremost in our minds as we consider amending our Constitution. Interestingly, a constitutional court – ruling solely on constitutional issues – is not at all a novel idea; many countries in the world already have this kind of tribunal. I hope our political leaders and our people shall at least explore this idea when the re-examination of our Constitution comes.