Born yesterday

(This was written before Renato Corona’s impeachment trial was concluded.-ED.)

My classmate once told me how he had always dreamt of becoming a Supreme Court justice.

We were in first year law school, at a time when I was still trying to understand why students were required to rise when the professor entered and left the room and why some professors would supposedly flunk anyone who would address them using the pronoun “you.” So we would stand up for recitation, and call them “the good professor,” and mumble stuff such as “If the good professor would allow me to read my notes” or “I agree with the good professor, I believe the Supreme Court is wrong.”

So I told my classmate: “Don’t worry, I’ll appoint you!” That was a joke, of course. I never wanted to be president even of our class, or of anything, let alone of this beautiful country with its beautiful troubles. He knew I was just mocking this almost-tradition sewn in the grand fibers of the history of our escuelas de leyes, of law-students-turned-politicians appointing their classmates, batchmates, brods and sisses to government positions. It’s as if we had gone to war and we just couldn’t help but “heart” our “mistahs” so much, we always wanted them close.

But my classmate, he was serious. He studied very hard, became a consistent member of the “Order of the Purple Feather” (our own Harry Potter-esque term for the Dean’s List), and was one of our bar-topnotcher bets. In my phonebook, his name was saved as his last name, “J.” (as in “Cruz, J.”—the way decisions would indicate who wrote them).

Cruz, J. is one of those perfect law students. The type our brilliant professor thinks of whenever he reminds us that if we are not aiming to be Supreme Court justices, then we are just wasting his time. The ideal life plan, we are made to believe, is to be a member of the bar, in PH and in NY,  work for Sycip, Accra, or CVC, or other high-profile law firms, get an LLM abroad, perhaps become a judge, and then a justice.

It was this sort of manufactured nobility, of law school slogans bleeding, in English and in Latin, the pursuit of excellence, integrity, honor. Of almost every lawyer, judge, justice with an ingrained sense of esteem of becoming a member of The Bar, an officer of the court, a footman/woman of justice, that some of them just have to remind everyone else and themselves every now and then by affixing the letters A-T-T-Y in their names and L-A-W-Y-E-R in their car plates.

One of our teachers once joked that when hailed by a traffic enforcer, some lawyers would just  flash their IBP (Integrated Bar of the Philippines) cards, and say, “Anong problema, boss, abogado ako (So what’s the problem, I’m a lawyer).”

That is why when some of them said it was an attack on The Institution that Chief Justice Renato Corona was impeached, I couldn’t help but be amused. It was an elite class, or so claimed, but the belief that its prestigious Chief is in some way immune from accountability made the idea of our justice system delusional. The men and women of the Supreme Court are not kings and queens.  Their records cannot claim to even live up to their title of Justice. Some of them have written decisions calling our indigenous peoples (IPs) uncivilized. One of my classmates, reciting on that case, even said he was offended by the high court.

Then there’s this long line of decisions that would question the ideals of excellence, integrity, and honor that they say the legal profession upholds. The most recent I can think of would be that an outgoing president can appoint a midnight chief justice, and another one about “unintentional plagiarism” found to be the fault of poor Microsoft Word, no less.

Sure, the impeachment trial has become, in a way, an attack on The Institution. And so be it. In the words of one of my professors, “our justice system is experiencing a systems failure.” The impeachment trial is indeed a recognition of this. It is not, as some people claim, undermining judicial independence. A president appoints justices, in the first place, and Congress has the power to institute impeachment proceedings to remove any of them. All that is being done is in the words of our Constitution. In fact, the trial has become so technical that it’s not easy not to be bored.

If it has done anything at this point, the trial can be said to demystify our judicial system, from the members of the “Alpha List” to the lawyers, to law schools, to our friendly notary public and their unassuming secretaries. The trial has been humanizing the “gods of Padre Faura,” pulling them back to earth, reminding them that they are actually just public servants, paid from the toils of the Filipino people, to whom they must be accountable. They cannot just insulate themselves from calls for judicial reform, and say that their dollar accounts are sacred, or that when a fellow justice plagiarized, he actually did not.

The people who convicted Corona in the surveys could just be voicing the general sentiment of distrust to the impeached Chief Justice and the system he heads. If SWS would ask anyone who has dealings with the law, he or she would normally give a sigh of disappointment to the man who is supposed to be the most honorable if we should ever have a fair, or at least working, justice system. We should go around and ask people who are in jail how long they have been behind bars even without a decision on their cases, or Lauro Vizconde, or practically everyone else, how long their trials have dragged, why it is not easy, and certainly not free, to obtain justice in this country.

As for students like Cruz, J. and me, who were born yesterday, our disappointment springs from our idea of a Supreme Court justice—an intellectual, one who writes decisions that are led by social movements, interprets the law to uphold social justice, or simply a justice in every sense of the word.

We are naturally frustrated.

The impeachment trial could hopefully result in judicial reforms, transparency and accountability among officers of the court, maybe some systemic changes and perhaps cultural, too. Lawyers, judges and justices would be sacred cows no more. Laws would not be used to protect only the interest of those who can hire expensive lawyers who write letters to justices. The trial could also end up saving justice in this country for those who truly need it. Maybe my classmate will himself be a justice someday, and in his time, with all the reforms in place, we will have a Supreme Court where he and his colleagues will deserve what they are called.

Kristine Mendoza, 25, is a senior law student at the University of the Philippines.