Success

The personalities in the impeachment have all sorts of advice to give to the new crop of lawyers. Not least of them Renato Corona himself who quipped in a congratulatory speech to them last week: “Kung gusto niyong mag-volunteer as additional defense counsel (for me), puwede na rin kayo.” Others had far more serious things to say, but they were largely in the nature of platitudes. Certainly, they themselves were not the best examples of the idealism and high-mindedness they were encouraging the new entrants to the force to possess.

I myself feel rather strongly about this, having just had a son-in-law, my daughter Miranda’s husband, who passed the bar exams. Truly the impeachment offers whole vistas into what being a lawyer is or ought to be, and conversely what a lawyer is not or ought not to be. Enough to want to press, and impress, upon the new lawyers a few do’s and don’ts. Though, as you will notice, drawing as I am from the impeachment, I have a lot more don’ts than do’s.

One, whatever you do, don’t be a Corona. That’s an advice actually that applies to any profession. Have some respect for your profession. You’re an ordinary lawyer, show some fineness or delicadeza, a way of comporting yourself in life that will never fail you. You’re a chief justice, show more. While at that, you want to be chief justice, get to be so by showing the world the best that a jurist can be. Certainly, do not get to be so by being sneaked into the position while the creatures of the dark flit about by the second most detested Filipino leader after the War.

Have some respect for your office. Or indeed for public office, if you want to go there, if you aspire to go there, if you manage to get there. A public office is a public trust. You deserve to be in public office only to the extent that you can show yourself fit for it, in the sense of having the skills for it and having the moral fiber for it. You do not deserve public office only so long as you can cling to it, daring others to prove you are a crook and a criminal while holding the power to prevent them from doing so. You get to be chief justice, show even more appreciation for that principle. Don’t be the epitome of pakapalan, a kapit-tuko like the two most detested Filipino leaders after the War.

Hell, have some respect for yourself. Have the heart to shoot yourself in the heart if you’ve done something to shame your mother or father to the roots of their being.

Two, never forget that the law serves justice. Your relatives, who spent a great deal for your education, or who sacrificed a great deal while you toiled in the night to become lawyers, will naturally be elated that you have become what you sought out to be. I do not know though that that will be the same feeling of the general populace. I suspect they will not be elated, they will be fearful. In this country, the prospect of having more lawyers is not a promise, it is a threat.

For good reason: In ordinary times in these parts, the law is subjected to the most strenuous exercises. Lawyers like to bend the law, stretch the law, contort the law. They call this a display of legal erudition, the public calls it palusot. The result being that if you’re rich, you can, and will, get away with murder. That is by no means metaphorical.

In extraordinary times in these parts, the law is employed for the most perverse ends. Two regimes in particular have done that, using the law to foment lawlessness, using the law to champion injustice. Never forget that the most lawful regime in this country was martial law: It had law to justify everything, including murder. Hell, including even the Filipinization of Ronnie Nathanielsz. Never forget that the second most lawful regime in this country was Gloria’s regime. It had a law to justify everything, including mayhem. Hell, including even turning Corona into chief justice.

Spurn that kind of law. Scorn that kind of lawyer. Be part of the cure, not the disease.

Three, never believe that the natural trajectory or career path of lawyers is to go from a lower-paying job to a higher-paying one. By all means go to a lower-paying one if you realize that the higher-paying one can only make you look like Miriam in the end. Nobility and loftiness and idealism are not alien to the profession, they are kindred to it. In its deepest sense, law is to be found in the heart, not in the statute books, or, heaven forbid, in the brick and mortar, steel and glass, that make up the prideful buildings of law firms. Like that idiotic one in the Fort that likes to call itself “the Firm,” forgetting, or perfectly remembering, that John Grisham originally used that epithet in a thoroughly ironic sense, to mean the group that employed its talents for the Mob, turning itself into an instrument not of law but of mob rule in every sense of the word.

Remember as well, that in the deepest sense, success, like law, is to be found in the heart, not in the approbation of peers, particularly where the peers are steeped in the culture of “forget the world, we take care of our own,” or in the trappings of wealth and power. That will not always be easy, particularly during reunions, when people get to be compared, how fantastically things have turned out for one, being employed as he is in a big firm and now owning a big house and a big car, and how miserable things have gone for the other, having “given up his future” to become a human rights lawyer. Success is the strangest thing there is. It is certainly one of the strangest words in the dictionary. In this country in particular, it has always been defined wrongly.

Four, whatever you do, try to be a Pepe Diokno.

You can’t be more successful than that.