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Problem-solvers, not gladiators
It was during the college recognition rites that a doctor of laws degree, honoris causa, was conferred on Senate President Franklin Drilon. His speech was the most intriguing and challenging, captured in one line: “Lawyers should be problem-solvers rather than gladiators. They should be more result-oriented rather than procedure-based.”
The senator bemoaned the way the practice of law has become adversarial, because of our system of litigation. The result is that courts become clogged with cases that take much too long to resolve.
I wondered if indeed our new lawyers could move away from the gladiator model of lawyering. We seem instead to be headed toward becoming like the United States, where people are always too ready to file lawsuits. I also worry that the law is seen more to prosecute, than to defend.
I thought that perhaps law schools should require their students to be exposed to our barangay system of resolving cases. Visit any low-income neighborhood’s barangay center on a weekend and you will find the kapitana (many barangay chiefs now are women) or her representatives presiding over an informal court. The scene is noisy, with the litigants as well as kibitzers (uzis) shouting at each other, lots of tears, fainting, chest-pounding. Many of the cases are domestic—for example, a wife going after a straying husband, but there are also many neighborhood disputes involving loud karaoke-playing, barking dogs, theft, drunken behavior, drug-pushing, and more extramarital affairs.
Many cases are adeptly resolved on the spot because our barangay chiefs, and their councils, aren’t quite as rule-bound. They modify, even break, the rules. They sit back sometimes and let the litigants shout it out, even slug it out.
I’m not saying that’s the way our courts should be. Rules and procedures do count, but what we’ve seen over the years is a judiciary gone awry. The rules are now used to the advantage of the rich and powerful, and lawyers are brought in to use those very rules to delay justice.
It’s important for law students to keep in touch with the world outside, to see the kinds of disputes that do arise, and the way people resolve those disputes on their own. When the more community-based forms of conflict resolution fail, then the courts, and lawyers, come in.
There is continuity there, which is why those congressional hearings on scams have become popular TV fare: They are in a sense like the barangay hearings, this time a whole nation of kibitzers coming to cheer or jeer.
The speeches during that week from our lawyers and lawyers-to-be keep going back to a theme of justice: law students owing taxpayers for their education, new law students urged to look into government service, lawyers reminded that they are obliged to deliver justice.
Throughout the speeches, I kept remembering the late senator Jose W. Diokno and how often he mentioned that what is legal is not always just, and what is just is not always legal. The challenge to future lawyers is to find ways for a better fit between the law and justice.
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E-mail: mtan@inquirer.com.ph
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