Government of laws (and men) 

 The ouster of Chief Justice Sereno by way of a Quo Warranto proceeding, the revocation of the grant of amnesty to Senator Trillanes and its elevation to the Supreme Court—these and other current or recent controversies call to mind the idea that “great cases make bad law,” a phrase made famous by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. This is what the father of the School of Legal Realism wrote in his dissenting opinion in Northern Securities Co. vs. United States (1904): Read more...

Of heroes and saints

Someone once pointed out to me a parallel between our national heroes, on one side, and our Catholic Saints, on the other: both categories of human persons are remembered and honored for certain admirable deeds or traits (“virtues”). Indeed, “hero” comes from the Latin (and Greek), heros, which means, “demigod”; while “saint” comes from the Latin, sanctus, which means, “holy”, “sacred”, i.e., of or belonging to God. Obviously, however, the two classes—national heroes and saints of religion—are not identical; they are merely analogous: our heroes are such in a temporal and secular (worldly) context, while saints pertain to an eternal or definitive and tanscendental order. (Read more...)