Thursday, December 22, 2016

SolGen Calida has a distorted logic. What is the relevance of a lawyer's bar exam grade in relation to his devotion, integrity, and competence as a public servant?



SolGen Calida has a distorted logic. What is the relevance of a lawyer's bar exam grade in relation to his devotion, integrity, and competence as a public servant?

Marcos was a bar topnotcher but he ended up in shame and oblivion in world history as an extremely brutal and corrupt president of a hungry nation.

I do not know if Calida's bar exam accomplishment is spectacular or not.

I am sure, though, that De Lima, the target of his insulting attack, placed fifth in the top ten of the 1985 bar exam, that she served in prominent positions in government with courage and dedication, i.e., CHR, DOJ, in addition to her long experience as a law professor and election law litigator.

I speak from personal experience.

Modesty aside, I placed third in the 1984 bar exam as a product of FEU Law as a Cocofed Law Scholar (90.95%, only 20% passed, none from UP Law placed in the Top Ten, for the first time in Philippine Bar history, including the Chief Justice Sereno, who took the bar exam in the same year).

UP, though, is close to my heart, having completed my pre-law degree there (journalism) and having spent many memorable years there as a young nationalist and patriotic student leader from the urban proletariat class.

I strongly hold the view that one's bar exam accomplishment is irrelevant to being a masterful trial lawyer or a law scholar or a dignified jurist or legal philosopher or law professor (from 1985 to 2006 I taught major law subjects for 21 years at FEU Law, my high school and law alma mater) or a Bar leader or a statesman or a thinker or a social critic or a pubic servant or a community leader or an ordinary citizen or a father or a husband or a brother or a neighbor or grandfather or a friend -- and the list goes on.

SolGen Calida speaks in a cavalier, unprofessional and ungentlemanly manner like his master Duterte, whose psychopathic and thug-like personality has infected his entire Cabinet (and millions of "Dutertards").

Calida should start learning how to behave as a scholarly and well-composed jurist, deserving of the title of "counsel for the State" and "tribune of the people:.

There is one law of nature that is truly relevant to lawyering: To be a "good lawyer", one must first be a "good person."

Duerte and his clique do not qualify under the said natural law.

4 hrs ·


“If her grade is higher than mine, then I will resign as Solicitor-General. But if my grade is higher than hers, she should resign as senator of the Philippines.”

For saying he has an “empty skull,” Solicitor-General Jose Calida on Wednesday dared Senator Leila De Lima to show her Bar examination score in Criminal Law…
NEWSINFO.INQUIRER.NET|BY TETCH TORRES-TUPAS