This is a belated post about the 2013 bar exams (whew I passed) thank you all very much.
Everything would be real only when I've celebrated with the people who were there every step of the way. So now, after my mother has trudged all the way from Batangas to the old/new Magnolia Ice Cream House, and I've gathered my friends from ten years back, can I say it officially: congratulations!
My bar story began decades back, when my mother was reviewing for her own exam, with me in her belly. But my own path to law school wasn't as clear-cut as expected, well, to me at least. I entered college wanting to be a doctor, but changed gears after being stumped by MBB 125. One exam required me to draw DNA using Lewis structure. Until now these words haunt me: Molecular Biology of the Eukaryotes. Shifting to journalism was such a bittersweet relief.
I don't know exactly when I decided to take up law, even as I've sat on the fence for many years. For a big deal of the time it felt like a Great Expectation, where I was my own Miss Havisham and at the same time Estella. Not least the many who thought I was the type who naturally flourished during arguments, compliment or not.
When I was younger and freshly weaned off the lectures on Philippine Social Realities, I had put aside law as useless. There is no need for lawyers if everybody knew their rights, their place, and their roles in life. Also, there wasn't too much space for them in the framework of national industrialization, where I'd imagined there should more workers than intellectuals, and among the educated, more in the practical fields than the contrived.
It was Karen Empeno's case which put me on the spot, when in early 2008 it was being bandied about that a legal relief can be used to find her and the many others missing. (A writ of amparo will later be granted to Nanay Conie Empeno and Nanay Linda Cadapan.) Back in 2004, Karen had taken on a task I was unwilling to take. This was my time to step up. Ready or not, I went this way.
Malcolm Hall has always been home to the eclectic, brilliant, and/or memorable sort. I'm fortunate to have found friends, classmates, and even professors who put up with me and duly noted my many causes, including the showbiz. Truth be told, I don't make friends easy, but I recognize kindred spirits when I see them. Law school tests your character from tip to toe, and boy am I glad to have found people to keep close despite differences. If anything, the most indelible lesson I picked up from the experience is respect and tolerance, especially when the views are diametrically opposite, and the passions squarely run counter.
All the crazy energy from law school times ten is what I got for bar review. My favorite regent Chief Justice Puno had warned me to take care of my physical health, but that wasn't my problem. I was perpetually running after time, as I was carved out time for activities, deep thoughts and fundamental questions. It was a personally difficult, emotionally and nerve wracking period for me. There are parts of it I wish I could forget, but hey, I don't do regrets. Indeed, the mind is a battlefield - you must win every day.
Here I am several months after, still a little rough around the edges but revved up for the next round. I have a tempered excitement about all this - one, I think there are many whom I think deserved to pass the bar, and two, come to think about it, this isn't much change for me at all. I've chosen my path early on, and in this field no one puts on airs just because of a law license. When you're with lawyers "that money cannot buy", all you count at the end of the day is how much you've made a difference. (Or, how many bottles of beer? Or better, over bottles of beer.)
The man they say I take after, the whirlwind that is Neri Colmenares, wrote me in August to remind me that the bar is a formality. Ultimately, he asks, whose recognition would be more important to me: the people's or the Supreme Court's? It's a rhetorical question that begs an entire, separate discourse. My mother had worked in government during my most impressionable years, and for quite a time was a public attorney. I met my first law firm lawyer when I was working for a business newspaper, and I wasn't too impressed. So please bear with me when I say I have no love lost for the firms and "big-time" lawyering.
Passing the bar I think has been a little bit exaggerated. Once the revelry over percentages, anecdotes, and inspirational stories wears off, what do we have? Lawyers, all 1,000 plus of us. Give us a few months, and everybody would be blaming us all again for all the problems of the world. My favorite realization about the law is still Dean Leonen's pointed critique about our freshman ethics forum. Law does not have a conscience, he said then, and it's precisely why we were in the College of Law and not the College of Justice. It's a point congruent with the assertion of people's lawyers that law is a distillation of the interest of the rulers, not necessarily of the ruled.
Peace talks lawyer Edre Olalia, whom the Crame CIDG honcho thought was my father, has always given the impression that we're in the middle of a war. I think so too. Whether it's a war in the courtroom, war between classes, or war within yourself, we're all steeped in contradictions that will yield one day to a new order. And the point now is this: if you have lawyers on either side, the one that is better prepared, strategically and tactically, brings home the bacon.
In the "Art of War", there is an enigmatic quote “To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy.” As the hearty greetings pour in, as the heady days toward oath-taking trickle by, the question to answer is: who is this Enemy? All I know for now is that it will take a lifetime to figure this out. Feelings, things, and people change; I hope I only do for the better. Please keep me grounded, everybody.
And thank you again, very much.
Everything would be real only when I've celebrated with the people who were there every step of the way. So now, after my mother has trudged all the way from Batangas to the old/new Magnolia Ice Cream House, and I've gathered my friends from ten years back, can I say it officially: congratulations!
My bar story began decades back, when my mother was reviewing for her own exam, with me in her belly. But my own path to law school wasn't as clear-cut as expected, well, to me at least. I entered college wanting to be a doctor, but changed gears after being stumped by MBB 125. One exam required me to draw DNA using Lewis structure. Until now these words haunt me: Molecular Biology of the Eukaryotes. Shifting to journalism was such a bittersweet relief.
I don't know exactly when I decided to take up law, even as I've sat on the fence for many years. For a big deal of the time it felt like a Great Expectation, where I was my own Miss Havisham and at the same time Estella. Not least the many who thought I was the type who naturally flourished during arguments, compliment or not.
When I was younger and freshly weaned off the lectures on Philippine Social Realities, I had put aside law as useless. There is no need for lawyers if everybody knew their rights, their place, and their roles in life. Also, there wasn't too much space for them in the framework of national industrialization, where I'd imagined there should more workers than intellectuals, and among the educated, more in the practical fields than the contrived.
It was Karen Empeno's case which put me on the spot, when in early 2008 it was being bandied about that a legal relief can be used to find her and the many others missing. (A writ of amparo will later be granted to Nanay Conie Empeno and Nanay Linda Cadapan.) Back in 2004, Karen had taken on a task I was unwilling to take. This was my time to step up. Ready or not, I went this way.
Malcolm Hall has always been home to the eclectic, brilliant, and/or memorable sort. I'm fortunate to have found friends, classmates, and even professors who put up with me and duly noted my many causes, including the showbiz. Truth be told, I don't make friends easy, but I recognize kindred spirits when I see them. Law school tests your character from tip to toe, and boy am I glad to have found people to keep close despite differences. If anything, the most indelible lesson I picked up from the experience is respect and tolerance, especially when the views are diametrically opposite, and the passions squarely run counter.
All the crazy energy from law school times ten is what I got for bar review. My favorite regent Chief Justice Puno had warned me to take care of my physical health, but that wasn't my problem. I was perpetually running after time, as I was carved out time for activities, deep thoughts and fundamental questions. It was a personally difficult, emotionally and nerve wracking period for me. There are parts of it I wish I could forget, but hey, I don't do regrets. Indeed, the mind is a battlefield - you must win every day.
Here I am several months after, still a little rough around the edges but revved up for the next round. I have a tempered excitement about all this - one, I think there are many whom I think deserved to pass the bar, and two, come to think about it, this isn't much change for me at all. I've chosen my path early on, and in this field no one puts on airs just because of a law license. When you're with lawyers "that money cannot buy", all you count at the end of the day is how much you've made a difference. (Or, how many bottles of beer? Or better, over bottles of beer.)
The man they say I take after, the whirlwind that is Neri Colmenares, wrote me in August to remind me that the bar is a formality. Ultimately, he asks, whose recognition would be more important to me: the people's or the Supreme Court's? It's a rhetorical question that begs an entire, separate discourse. My mother had worked in government during my most impressionable years, and for quite a time was a public attorney. I met my first law firm lawyer when I was working for a business newspaper, and I wasn't too impressed. So please bear with me when I say I have no love lost for the firms and "big-time" lawyering.
Passing the bar I think has been a little bit exaggerated. Once the revelry over percentages, anecdotes, and inspirational stories wears off, what do we have? Lawyers, all 1,000 plus of us. Give us a few months, and everybody would be blaming us all again for all the problems of the world. My favorite realization about the law is still Dean Leonen's pointed critique about our freshman ethics forum. Law does not have a conscience, he said then, and it's precisely why we were in the College of Law and not the College of Justice. It's a point congruent with the assertion of people's lawyers that law is a distillation of the interest of the rulers, not necessarily of the ruled.
Peace talks lawyer Edre Olalia, whom the Crame CIDG honcho thought was my father, has always given the impression that we're in the middle of a war. I think so too. Whether it's a war in the courtroom, war between classes, or war within yourself, we're all steeped in contradictions that will yield one day to a new order. And the point now is this: if you have lawyers on either side, the one that is better prepared, strategically and tactically, brings home the bacon.
In the "Art of War", there is an enigmatic quote “To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy.” As the hearty greetings pour in, as the heady days toward oath-taking trickle by, the question to answer is: who is this Enemy? All I know for now is that it will take a lifetime to figure this out. Feelings, things, and people change; I hope I only do for the better. Please keep me grounded, everybody.
And thank you again, very much.