ABSTRACT
Philippine constitutional discourse today is characterized by two competing tendencies. On one hand, a highly formalistic account of the rule of law, “a government of laws and not of men,” had animated the anti-Marcos democratic movement and left its mark in the Filipino legal imagination. Because of such overweening trust in formal institutions, there is the urge to “juridify” policy debates-that is, to turn to the courts to advance social causes and to resolve political disputes. On the other hand, this constitutionally induced judicial activism has resulted in the relaxation of doctrine, for example, in liberalized rules of standing and justiciability. It has also produced an outcome-oriented jurisprudence, as if the courts were in a perpetual popularity contest refereed by polling groups and single-interest lobbies, all of them oblivious to the professional demands of the legal craftsman and attuned solely to the questions “who won?” and “are we on the same side?” Unwittingly, this has abetted an unabashed derision for law as “legal gobbledygook” (a term popularized during the impeachment trial of President Estrada), a readiness to bypass formal processes in favor of substantive results, and to see in law not fixed standards but movable goal-posts as political seasons change.
