I call and urge those taking the ongoing bar exams to wear black this Sunday. Many of us might think this is irrelevant to our dream of passing the bar exams. Many of us will not bother. Many of us may just blindly ignore and swallow the Supreme Court ruling allowing the burial of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Libingan ng mga Bayani. It’s the Supreme Court anyway.
Remember that we are taught and trained to go beyond memorizing provisions of the law. We are trained to analyze, criticize and argue. We go beyond the letter and technicalities of the law. We go beyond parroting Latin maxims. We dig deep into the law’s essence to effect justice.
We need to be focused on the remaining Sundays of the bar exams, but we should not be like horses with blinders and keep going, ignoring the injustices along our way and accepting them as invariable. We do not set them aside and consider them less important and urgent than passing the bar exams.
Remember that our dream does not end with “ATTY.” affixed to our name. There’s a lot ahead of us after the grueling four Sundays of bar exams, which may be similarly life and history changing.
If we remain quiet in these times of outrage and fail to challenge the morally corrupt Supreme Court decision, then we will have only acquiesced to the horrors of martial law and revision of history, and failed to perform our duty of upholding justice as future members of the bar. In that sense, we will have failed our legal education even before finishing the bar exams. Stand with the Filipino people. #BlacktoBlock #MarcosNoHero #NeverForget
MARIA SOL TAULE, member, National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers, bar candidate