Excellence

We should think long and hard about who the next Chief Justice will be.

This is not just about elevating a person to a post of high esteem. This is ultimately about finding a person of exceptional intellectual quality and compelling personality to lead an entire branch of government out of the quagmire.

In the aftermath of a truly distasteful impeachment effort, we inherit a judiciary that one retired Chief Justice aptly describes as a severely wounded institution. The wounds will take many years to heal. In the meantime, our democracy will hobble through a period of imbalance between the theoretically independent branches of government.

The next Chief Justice will have a heroic role to play in the evolution of our institutions. He must not only possess the demonstrated excellence that commands awe. He must also possess a high emotional quotient that will enable proper management of the court system.

The Judicial and Bar Council (JBC) holds principal responsibility for winnowing a long list of applicants and choosing those who might best be able to redeem the judiciary. It is, to be sure, a strange committee populated in the main by politicians and presidential appointees. We can only hope the JBC will rise above its infirmities.

Enough of this banal discussion about signing bank waivers and scrutinizing SALNs. It does not address the truly important qualities of the Chief Justice we need at this juncture.

If the SALNs of all the prosecutors and the senator-judges who managed to convict Justice Corona on charges barely documented at the onset, were subjected to the same scouring done on the defendant’s accounts, all of them will be convicted. Let us not perpetuate the hypocrisy.

Instead of looking into the candidate’s bank accounts, let us look at the books they have written and the decisions they penned. The JBC must not perform as financial voyeurs but as judicial sages. We do not need accountants to fulfill the JBC’s duties; we need discernment.

An inferior choice will only deepen disillusionment. It will only reinforce the notion that the bench has been so politicized, appointments could only be made by means of the political prism instead of the timeless excellence the majesty of the post demands.

Most of the names in the first crop of nominees fail to inspire. It seems their names were segregated by means of the current dispensation’s preferred political prism. The first rule ought to be to take out those personalities who played a direct or indirect role in the divisive impeachment episode we just went through.

Surely we have the time to look further than those already mentioned. The historical weight of this next appointment demands that we do.

Being neither of the bar nor the bench, I am not sure I have the standing to make suggestions to the JBC. Nonetheless, I could think of a few people I know who might sit as Chief Justice without inducing too much discomfort. These are people with enough gravitas for the post — not because of their partisan alignment but because of their record of achievement.

The first person that comes to mind is Dean Pacifico Agabin, formerly of the UP College of Law. He placed second in the 1966 bar exams and studied at the Yale Law School. Among the many law books he authored was one that won the 1997 National Book of the Year Award in Law.

Agabin chairs the constitutional law department of the Philippine Judicial Academy and serves as the general counsel of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines. Besides his private practice, Agabin continues to lecture at the UP and sits as dean of the Lyceum College of Law.

The second person that comes to mind is Prof. Ruben Balane. He graduated cum laude from the UP College of Law and, like Agabin, placed second in the bar exams. He currently handles civil law review at the Ateneo School of Law.

Then there is former congressman Ronaldo Zamora. At only 18, he served as editor of the Philippine Collegian. He graduated magna cum laude in political science at the UP in 1965 and was valedictorian of his College of Law class — not a mean feat, considering this class included the likes of Miriam Defensor and Franklin Drilon.

Zamora is well-versed in the nuances of our political world. He served as assemblyman in the Batasang Pambansa before serving in the 8th, 9th and 10th Congress. After taking a break because of term limits, he once more served in the 12th, 13th and 14th Congress. He served two terms as majority leader and two terms as minority leader.

As legislator, Zamora sponsored landmark laws such as the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law, the law creating the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and the organic act creating the Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao. His remarkable record as legislator is supplemented by his work in the executive branch, serving as executive secretary to former president Joseph Estrada.

No other potential nominee for Chief Justice matches Zamora’s depth and breadth of exposure to legal scholarship, legislation and the workings of the executive branch of government. That exposure brings the wisdom required to redeem the judicial branch from the crisis it is in at this time.

There are others I could name here, but the point is made: there is great wealth of qualified people out there who could serve as Chief Justice.

These men of excellence do not hobnob share precisely the virtue of independence we need. Judicial independence could not possibly be built by one who, fairly or unfairly, is perceived to be partisan.