With a warrior’s code of honor

ED’S NOTE: These are excerpts of the author’s tribute to former solicitor general Frank Chavez delivered at the memorial service held on Sept. 14 at Santuario de San Antonio in Makati City.

We are gathered here tonight to pay our last respects to the late Francisco Ibrado Chavez, Esquire, or simply “Frank” to his friends and admirers, who, I dare say, must number in the legions.

Instead of lapsing into lamentation about Frank’s untimely demise, I should like to dwell on an aspect of his life that was his defining quality: that Frank, above all else, was a lawyer, in the sense of an advocate or a barrister, and in the finest sense of that word.

He was a lawyer’s lawyer, a quintessential lawyer, a lawyer nonpareil, without equal among today’s practitioners.

Frank’s record as a practicing lawyer, and a former solicitor general, is well known and therefore needs no elaboration—except perhaps to note that as a trial lawyer, for our clients and, for a time, the republic itself, he comported himself as a warrior for whom defeat was out of the question. Indeed, defeat was never ever contemplated, especially when the cause which he happened to be espousing was meritorious and, more, just. On these occasions, not only did he aspire to win his cases, but also aimed to experience the sheer “puritanical” joy of the winning points, especially on crossing an adverse witness on the stand, in the course of a trial.

But always, Frank waged his courtroom battles with a warrior’s code of honor, with its iron insistence on compliance with such virtues as courage, gallantry, chivalry and, above all, nobility.

In today’s still blighted state of the country—where most lawyers are, or perceived to be, nothing but hustlers or fixers, or both, and more, where lawyers of old like the departed Claro M. Recto, Jose P. Laurel Sr., Juan Sumulong, or the father-and-son tandem of Ramon and Jose Wright (Pepe) Diokno, are mostly “remembrances of things past”—Frank, the warrior, with his punctilious warrior’s code of honor, would be an anachronism, the quintessential Don Quijote de la Mancha, but not quite a  lusus  naturae, or freak of nature.

But in our still blighted country, such as it is—despite P-Noy’s much-talked-about and much-advertised (if nothing else) “daang  matuwid”—being an anachronism or being Quixotic is a badge of honor which Frank wore with dignity and pride.

As for Frank’s record as a solicitor general, may I invite you to ponder this paradox: After leaving that office more than 20 years ago, Frank still was the solicitor general—as if the man and the office, or the office and the man, had become fused, firmly, irrevocably, immutably.

More than 80 years ago, in 1931, Justice Benjamin Nathan Cardozo of the US Supreme Court made an observation about the legal profession in the United States: “We are fallen upon days which are spoken of by many as cynical and sordid. The profession is given over, we are told, to the pursuit of power and pelf.” What was true of the United States in 1931 is even truer of the Philippines today. And is true—starkly, may I add—where legislators, the (dis)Honorable “senatongs” and the equally (dis)Honorable

“tongressmen,” most of whom are lawyers, are now exposed finally as wallowing and slurping away, ravenously and rapaciously, in the muck, the mire and the mud of the pork barrel scandal.

But Frank, despite the sordidness and the squalor around him, never wavered in his faith in the legal profession in the country, or rather, in his ideal of the legal profession. For him, the aim of the legal profession—in good times and bad—always is “…to uplift what is low, to erase what is false, to redeem what has been lost, till all the world shall see, and seeing shall understand, that union of the scholar’s thought, the mystic’s yearning, the knight’s ardor, and the hero’s passion, which is still in truest moments of self-expression, the spirit of the bar!”

For Frank, also, the ultimate goal of the law is justice, to which he, in his youth and up to his dying moments—fallen, tragically, at the relatively youthful age of 66—“lent the passion and the glory of the spring.” Moreover, for Frank, as for the late British professor of jurisprudence at Oxford, the legendary H.L.A. Hart—who, by common consent, is the greatest legal philosopher of the 20th century—“[J]ustice is both a virtue especially appropriate to law and the most legal of all the virtues.”

Perhaps we may never see the likes of Frank again, not in 100 years or 200, perhaps never—a warrior who is undaunted and is indomitable, whatever the odds, when fighting or giving battle alone, and only by himself, against his chosen adversaries: injustice generally, the craftiness, the corruption and the cupidity (or swinishness) of the powerful or a privilege caste, “the law’s delay, the insolence (indeed any perfidiousness) of office,” which involves apostasy to, or to put it bluntly, faithlessness or betrayal of an oath, which is both witting and willful, and also and always, self-seeking or self-serving.

Throughout his professional life, which spanned more than 40 years, and even as a student at the UP College of Law in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Frank fought many such battles, fearlessly and unafraid, mostly by himself. Most of these battles he won, and a few he lost, whose scars he wore, ever so proudly, as medals of valor.

In all of these battles—for those in the know of Frank’s exploits, which are epic—he truly was bigger than life! More, Frank was an elemental force of nature: He was wind, water and fire.

Sadly, we who are gathered here tonight should like to remark to you: that we will not see you again, at least not in this lifetime. And so we would like to say to you direct from our hearts, to your heart, in the mournful words of the English poet Lord Byron: “Fare thee well and if forever still forever, fare thee well.”

Goodbye, Frank. Godspeed.

Jose C. Laureta has been a law practitioner from 1956 to the present, and a professor of the UP College of Law from 1960 to 1987 and from 2005 to the present.