1 To: From: All Law School Deans and 2013 Bar Examinees: Arturo D.

Brion, Associate Justice 2013 Bar Examinations Chairman May 6, 2013

Date:

For your information, hereunder are the Bar-related portions of the speeches I delivered at the Graduation Ceremonies of the Ateneo Law School (on April 21, 2013) and of the San Sebastian College of Law (on April 30, 2013). I furnish you these excerpts as a measure of fairness as the thoughts they embody were communicated to the graduating classes; they may be worthwhile to communicate to all bar examinees as they approach the 2013 Bar Examinations.

A. Excerpts from the Ateneo Law School Graduation Speech.

xxx When the Bar examinations come, what will matter, more than anything else, are the efforts you have put in to reach your goal, supplemented by prayers, and by the will and the spirit that surmounting any challenge require. But make no mistake about all these, what will count most will be your own efforts, your prayers, your will, and your spirit to achieve and overcome. Perhaps as a measure of the kind of effort, will and spirit you should have in place, you should read and consider as a useful bar preparation material the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The author examines in this book the factors that contribute to high levels of success. After looking at the stories of Bill Gates and the Beatles, among others, Gladwell formulated the 10,000-Hour Rule; he claims that to be eminently successful, you have to put in 10,000 hours of preparatory work as Bill Gates and the Beatles did.

Look at where their 10,000-hour preparation brought the Beatles and Bill Gates, and let me ask you: do you have in you the will and the spirit that the Ateneo always inspires, to exert the kind of efforts that will bring you to your desired goal? I leave you to your own thoughts on this point but as Bar Examinations Chairman for this year, I will say this to you and to all Bar examinees. We are doing our share of the 10,000-hour rule to give you an examination that will test your capability to render competent, responsible and ethical legal service. I have continuing consultations with each of this years Bar examiners, all of them seasoned lawyers with academic experience behind them. Our resolve is to give you a fair and balanced examination. When we say fair, we mean to test you for the amount of knowledge that you should ideally have as starting lawyers, not as seasoned practitioners with years of practice behind them. When we speak of balance, we refer to the length of the exam in relation with the allotted time, now four hours for all subjects; the level of difficulty; and the distribution of the questions according to the weight of the particular components of a bar exam subject. We aim to formulate reasonable questions focusing on the law, the reason behind the law, and the principles involved. So I say now to you: give us the intellectual sweat that entry into the legal profession requires, and add to this the will, spirit and prayers that underlie every successful task and you will have no difficulty with the coming Bar examinations! This is the time-tested formula that I know and should be your mantra in the coming months. Reading the Law As an additional and continuing reminder in re-reading the law during your review and even after passing the bar, focus not only on the WHAT the law is, but also on WHY the law is there. Always remember that every law or rule, at its most basic, is a rule of reason, morality, ethics, and common sense. These are the essential elements of the WHY of the law that you must remember during the bar examinations, as these are your direction-finders in the exam; they will point you to the correct answers when and if you are in doubt. They are very important, too, as the WHY is what you will carry

3 with you throughout your legal career when you discharge your duties to society as lawyers in whatever sector of legal service you find yourself in. xxx The Lawyers World

Today marks the day when you are thrust outside the nurturing walls of the academe and into the real world. Let me tell you that the Bar examinations are not half as scary as the world you will see out there as lawyers. After being a lawyer for 38 years, I can tell you that the legal professions intellectual demands are far easier to overcome than the demands of the real world that are as exacting and as unforgiving as the writers and the poets depict them to be. You will face this world burdened by the high ideals that society, the law profession and your own alma mater have imposed on and expect from you. Yet, this same society, at the practical level, many times does not appear to give premium to the high ideals it professes and that it has itself set. In the practice of law, for example, it is not remote for you to meet clients who will demand positive results at whatever cost, financial or otherwise. In the Judiciary, we meet people whom I call feelers who very subtly feel you out if you can be talked to, to use a common euphemism in the profession. You may wonder why these people so act when they themselves condemn graft and corruption to high heavens in their public speeches and writings, in their press pronouncements, and in their private statements. The cold reality is that you are in the real world where people look the other way when their own interests are involved. Another face of the real world is a society where, up to this day, inequity reigns. Statistics show that in the Philippines, despite recent improvements, pervasive hunger, poverty and unacceptable social inequality still exist; our distribution of wealth and income is among the worst in our part of the world. I will not cite statistics to support these statements because all one needs to do to validate them is to go around Metro Manila and observe.

4 With this kind of awareness, what would you as a labor lawyer do when your client, awash with funds, stubbornly resists perfectly legal demands that merely come up to the minimum legal standards? How will handle a labor case that questions a minimum wage of $400 for OFWs who had previously been receiving only $200 for their dawn to dusk efforts as domestic helpers? Would you deliberately delay a criminal case as a strategy to exhaust the prosecution and its witnesses to the point of surrender? Independently of what you read in the newspapers, have you given thought to how you would as a lawyer, as a responsible citizen, and as a Christian react to the Reproductive Health Law? These are some of the questions that you did not perhaps directly confront in law school but will meet in the real world. Faced with these types of situations where the path of least resistance may be easier to take, what would you do? xxx Preparation for the Lawyers World I cite all these positions and my rhetorical question, together with the real world situations new lawyers face, to drive home the point that aside from the strict training in law that prepares lawyers for the bar exams, for courtroom work, and for providing out-of-court legal assistance they must be trained and be prepared for other disciplines and concerns to sharpen their sensitivity, approaches and responses in these areas. For the law is interwoven with these other concerns, many of them not purely legal in character, that every graduate and every lawyer should be keenly aware of. Among these and by far the most pressing in our contemporary legal world are ethics and moral values. The law school, of course, does indeed teach Legal Ethics and subjects touching on morals, but the realities I pointed out still raise the question: are we preparing our graduates and potential lawyers for the deeper questions that lie beyond or that underlie our codes of professional and judicial ethics? Or, are these graduates left alone cast adrift, so to speak to paddle like Pi in the Oscar Award winning movie Life of Pi. To explain to those who have not seen the movie Pi was a teenage boy cast adrift in a small boat in the trackless Pacific Ocean in the company of a hungry tiger and a ferocious hyena.

A first and most basic awareness is that the law is not only a cold measuring standard or a validating norm in a rule book. Imbedded in every law are the elements of ethics, morality, and other underlying reasons that brought the law into being. These imbedded elements in fact constitute the soul of the law that gives it meaning and actual obligatory force. Do not forget that we do not simply follow the law because the President, Congress or the courts direct us to do so. We follow the law because we know and feel deep inside that its command is the right thing to do. Remove this element and you are left with a soul-less law that cannot long stand. Leave this element uncertain in a Supreme Court decision and you are left with a jurisprudential aberration that sooner or later causes what the legal community now mockingly calls a flip-flop. In the simplest terms, all laws and all judicial and executive decisions to deserve respect and abiding obedience must be congruent with societys accepted sense of right and wrong. If this is the case, where does the lawyer, starting in the law, get his or her bearings and reinforcement for what he or she instinctively knows to be right or wrong? Will the lawyer, like Pi in the movies, simply use his native cunning and survival instincts? This is not the time, nor the place, nor the occasion to dissect this question for all possible answers. But for now, I raise the point that the law school is where our lawyers have the last chance to be formally educated about conceptions of the law as it should be a rule of reason dictated by society based on its notions of right and wrong. The law school is the last formal chance to acquaint our potential lawyers with reality lessons in law before they are thrust into the real world. The law school years are the formative years in law of every lawyer, at the same time that the Bar examinations represent the last formal test that law students undergo to gauge their readiness for the profession. Beyond these, lie the real world and the dilemmas it brings. For these reasons, I find the meaningful teaching of concepts of right and wrong in dealing with the law to be compelling. Among the professions, we lawyers possess the greatest potentials next only perhaps to priesthood to contribute to the ordering of our society. These potentials

6 burden us with responsibilities whose discharge we cannot leave to chance or approach in a default mode. We act on this responsibility by recognizing that our society needs, not only competence in technical legal skills, but likewise a well-developed sense of right and wrong, in our lawyers. Dreams and Visions for Legal Education I am sure that these thoughts may raise cynical smiles in some and dismissive shrugs in others who may feel that here again are usual utopian thoughts. I cannot stop these reactions, but neither can they stop me from these dreams and visions the start of everything I have done with some degree of success in life. Hence, this afternoon, I will not hesitate, or be shy, or feel guilty or ashamed, to tell you of my dreams and visions that at some future time: the kind of ethics and morality in law that I dream about will begin to materialize driven by our legal education; we will have a law school curriculum where ethics and morality are taught as components of every law subject, not as an independent subject given a weight of one or two units; common ethical and moral pitfalls in every law subject and in law practice will be taught as practical lessons of what law students may have to hurdle in the real world; law schools shall walk their talk in the teaching of ethics and morality as part of their institutional academic freedom; sooner rather than later, we will have bar examinations sensitive to ethics and morality as concerns and standards that examinees must satisfy to enter the legal profession; and if a renaissance in ethics and morality in legal education, in the profession and in society will start anywhere, it will start in this law school where all my dreams and visions about the law started.

B. Excerpts from the San Sebastian College of Law Graduation Speech.

xxx The Bar Examinations. As I did a week ago before the Ateneo Law School, allow me at the outset to say something on what your next small leap shall be. The study of law, as you now very well know, is not an easy task to undertake. Your review in the next six months should even be harder because of the required focus and intensity; in these next six months, you will practically go over and collate everything that you studied in the past four years. So let me already remind all of you, do your review at the earliest opportunity and do it like the morrow will never come. To exemplify the efforts you need, I have unceasingly pointed out that a good pre-Bar non-legal material you should read is the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell where the author looked at eminent success stories and analyzed how these successes were achieved. He looked, among others, at the Beatles (whom you all know and have heard) and Bill Gates (the founder of Microsoft), and found that it must have taken them 10,000 hours of preparation to attain success. You must marvel at this number but this is not really an actual number but more of a measure of the kind of effort exerted to reach their level of success. In the case of the Beatles, early amateur years in England and long playing hours in small obscure clubs in Germany took up most of the 10,000 hours of their training to perfect their art. Bill Gates passion for computers, on the other hand, started as early as his teen years; he practically taught himself the basics of computers until, by himself, he became the master of the field. xxx The Bar Exams and You. Perhaps it has not dawned on many of you, but your aspiration should not only be to pass the Bar examinations. You must realize that for many of you, it is not an impossibility to land in the top 10 of the Bar exams; you can

8 in fact be there, or at least in the top 20, if only you will have, and will act on, this dream. Ask Judy Lardizabal (1st place, 2008), Karen Canullas (6th place, same year), and Henry Francisco (9th place, 2003), all from this school, and ask the 17 others that your review center helped through the years, and they will tell you that it can be done. Do not forget that the least that can happen if you fall short of this dream is that you will pass the Bar and would have given yourself a very good preparation for your coming legal career. The key in doing this, as I personally found out during my own time with the Bar examinations, is to think, act, sleep, eat, and do everything in the next six months with the Bar exams on your mind. In short, you must have, or must start to develop, in the next six months the beginnings of a passion for the study of law. If you can only nourish and allow this passion to grow, you will find out that it can bring you loftier dreams that, with the same passionate approach, can further guide you to opportunities and achievements you never imagined would be possible. This passion, in fact, can start you off in the road that ultimately leads to the pinnacle of a lawyers dream to have a honed and welldeveloped passion for justice. I know of no hard and fast rule on how these passions develop as they vary from lawyer to lawyer. As a rule, however, the love for the study of law starts sometime during law school and deepens as the student prepares for the Bar examinations, where he or she gets the chance for a well-rounded view of the various aspects of the law. At some point during this period, the passion for the study of law develops. With continued dedication, this passion goes deeper and becomes a passion for the law love for the law, not only for the rules that constitute the actual law, but for the beauty and symmetry the law exhibits and for the reasons and purposes it represents. Along the way, a deeply-felt awareness for the underlying ethical and moral concerns is internalized, followed by the last and final stages the acute sense of fairness and ultimately, a passion for justice. This passion is the unquenchable urge to accord everyone his due, observing fairness and duly considering the social setting, imperatives and the consequences of his actions. At this point, the lawyer fulfills and fully serves the function and purpose for which he or she exists as a professional in society.

9 In reflecting on these thoughts, do not forget that ours is a lawyerdominated society and will be so in the immediately foreseeable future; lawyers serve key roles everywhere, whether in the public or in the private sector. Note that 7 of the 15 Philippine Presidents are lawyers; 11 of its 16 Vice Presidents are lawyers; 14 of 21 Senate Presidents are lawyers, and that eligibility for many positions under our Constitution requires membership in the Philippine Bar. Many lawyers have been presidents and top executives of leading Philippine corporations, not to mention those in lesser but no less important roles. There, too, is private law practice that is needed in a society that largely depends on law for its ordering and harmony. Thus, before you, is a profession that is fertile in promise and opportunities to serve society well, without forgetting or neglecting your own reasonable personal interests. All these you can do if you will only rise up to the challenges of study and develop the desirable passions to the required degree. But, of course, you must consider, too, that the legal ordering of society, as well as the roles the legal community plays, is an aspect of our national life that is continually in a flux and may even be marred by controversy. Lawyering is not a profession for the weak-kneed and for the faint-hearted; you must be able to assert and hold your own where you feel and believe that the cause is worthy and you are in the right. Likewise, note that despite the righteousness of many causes, they end up because of adverse media publicity in the short end of public criticism. Thus, despite the eminence accorded to lawyers in Philippine society, the legal profession has oftentimes been viewed with disdain, both publicly and privately. A certain level of distrust cannot, of course, be avoided because lawyers are needed most when controversies exist; they are often seen in opposing camps, leading to questions in the public mind on why lawyers, sworn from their earliest days in the profession to truth and justice, can see things both ways and be in camps that cannot both be right. Frustration with politicians is an added factor, as many politicians are lawyers. In fact, not even the Judiciary and the Supreme Court have escaped this kind of impression; the Court and the members of the Judiciary have been viewed rightly or wrongly not to be the exemplars of the fairness and justice that they should embody. Many factors explain, affect, aggravate or mitigate how lawyers are viewed by society, but this is not the time, nor the occasion, to examine these issues. At this point, you must simply realize that the legal profession

10 is a calling saddled with both positive and negative perceptions. Societys ambivalence should not, however, leave you daunted or dismayed; beyond these views are very live challenges and chances for fulfillment that await lawyers who can significantly and positively affect our society. Very briefly, I can see three basic challenges that we including the future generation of lawyers to come long after this graduation should continue to confront without let-up in concerted and focused battles. In the push and pull between the higher and lower sides of our human nature, there will always be the threatened erosion of the rule of law, the continuing fight against the deterioration of ethics and morals in the profession, and the ugly head of a negative imbalance in our system of dispensation of justice. These challenges, singly or collectively, can tear at the fabric of our society unless reasonably brought under control. The Rule of Law The rule or supremacy of the law is a must if a society is to be orderly and harmonious. But while declared obeisance to this supremacy and its need to predominate are not difficult to make, the full and strict observance of the rule is another matter. For, to fully recognize the supremacy of the law, both the law and the authorities making, interpreting and implementing the law must be respected. Speeches, for example, about the control of corruption are far easier to deliver than the avoidance of corruption or the actual implementation of this control. Respect, in the sense of high regard or deference, can only arise if the law itself, and its interpretation, implementation and application are accepted by society because they are fair and reasonable. Lawyers and other members of the legal community, notably, have a major role in ensuring continued respect for the law as they are the people dealing with the law on a day-to-day basis. You yourselves will form part of this legal community after you pass the Bar examinations. Because of the attendant stumbling blocks, respect for the rule of law must be inculcated in the professionals dealing with the law at the earliest opportunity; all potential and active lawyers must fully internalize the rule of law as part of their mindsets to allow them to serve as the examples that society should look up to and emulate as leading models in bowing to the

11 dictates of the law. I am sure some cynical veteran lawyer will smile at this thought on the claim that this is easier said than done in the give-and-take of law practice in the real world. But if this claim is a reality at all, the attendant difficulty is no excuse to be an exception to the rule of law and the lawyer who disobeys should be made aware that his career thereby runs a very grave risk. Let him now stand warned. Ethics and Moral Values Underlying every law, understood as a rule of reason embodying the choices of society, are ethics and moral values the sense of right and wrong commonly observed in a society. I particularly point them out for the reason I have already cited lawyers deal with the law daily in their professional lives. Thus, aside from the strict training in law that prepares lawyers for the bar exams, for courtroom work, and for providing general legal assistance, every lawyer should be keenly aware of, and every potential lawyer must be trained in, the areas of ethics and moral values to sharpen their sensitivity, approaches and responses to the problems that these concerns pose. Believe me, these problems are many as they are varied and should now be serious concerns for everyone, particularly for our policymakers, starting from our legal educators all the way up to the Supreme Court. For this reason, legal ethics will have a special place in your coming Bar exams. Aside from the subject Legal Ethics on the 4th Sunday of the exams, ethics will be related to each of the other bar subjects where questions with underlying ethical considerations may be posed. Fairness and Justice Finally, let me go to the dispensation of justice of which I am now a part. Early on in my law practice years, I learned that every case is the case of the century for the parties involved, one of whom is my client. Thus, I have given every case and every client the importance they deserve. A corollary to this approach is my view that every litigant who feels wronged or unjustly treated by our justice system is a citizen carrying a grievance against the system. Even the improvident issuance of a temporary restraining order or TRO can have this effect.

12 Multiply these incidents many times over and you can have a host of dissatisfied citizens, carrying their internal outrage against our system and ultimately against the society that has allowed this kind of injustice to flourish. This, to say the least, is not a very healthy sign for any society, particularly for a local society and for a world that have recent memories of upheavals and revolutions. I particularly mention this reality to you as potential lawyers to remind you, this early, that the dispensation of justice is not a burden for the Judiciary alone to undertake. As lawyers for the parties, you will be active participants in the system, together with the judges, the prosecutors and the litigating public. We are in this system together as active partners, and any dissatisfaction with one of us constitutes a potential grievance against our justice system and against our society. Every justice, judge, quasi-judicial adjudicator or prosecutor who asks for a bribe violates the system, in the same manner that every private counsel who asks his or her client for lagay or pa-thank you under the pretext that this is demanded by an adjudicating official grievously brings the dispensation of justice to disrepute. Any litigating member of the public who asks his or her lawyer to resort to all means, fair or foul, is equally guilty and cannot and should not be excused. In my view, the existing level of corruption and the perception of corruption in the justice system are the biggest problems of our system and the main reason for the public contempt or disdain for the profession. To be sure, no one system participant can remedy this malaise alone as it is present in every sector in the system. Only a concerted action, to include even those who have yet to be admitted into the profession, can serve as a countermeasure to this cancer in our midst; together, all of us must act. And I say this to all law students and Bar applicants, not necessarily for purposes of the Bar examinations, but both as a warning to one and all and as a plea to everyone to help through their full cooperation, for the sake of our profession and of our nation.

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