Presbitero Velasco Jr. retires from Supreme Court

MANILA, Philippines — Leaving more than 1,000 decisions, opinions and resolutions, Associate Justice Presbitero Velasco Jr. retired from the Supreme Court (SC) yesterday after serving the judiciary for over 20 years.

Retired chief justice and consultative committee on constitutional amendments chairman Reynato Puno, meanwhile, endorsed Court Administrator Jose Midas Marquez as Velasco’s replacement.

Velasco, who reached the judiciary’s mandatory retirement age of 70, was given honor in a retirement ceremony at the high court in the afternoon, followed by dinner at the Manila Hotel.

Velasco finished his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science degree at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City where he also received his Bachelor of Laws at age 22 and ranked eighth in his class. He placed sixth in the 1971 Bar examinations with a weighted average rating of 89.85 percent.

Velasco was chairman of the 2016 Bar examinations, which produced the highest passing percentage of 75 percent. Records showed that out of 6,344 Bar examinees, 3,747 passed the tests and became lawyers.

At the SC, he wrote more than 1,000 decisions, opinions and resolutions, signed or unsigned.

Among the landmark decisions he penned were on the cases of Hacienda Luisita in 2011 and Manila Bay rehabilitation in 2008.

In the Hacienda Luisita case, the Court ordered the distribution of more than 4,330 hectares of the vast estate owned by the family of former president Benigno Aquino III to 6,296 farmworker-beneficiaries. With each farmer given around 6,600 square meters to till, his lifelong dream of owning a piece of land was finally fulfilled leading to emancipation from the “bondage of the soil.”

The ruling on Manila Bay rehabilitation, on the other hand, introduced for the first time in the Philippine legal system the “writ of continuing mandamus” or “continuing court interference” scheme to ensure that the dispositive directives set forth in the decision are implemented.