“x x x.
IX. CONCLUSION
During the first years of the republican form of government as we know it today, especially in 1789 during the 1st Congress of the U.S. government, “one of the most important means of initiating legislation came from petitions sent in from individuals and groups seeking relief, assistance or redress of grievances.
These petitions represented a long tradition in Britain and America for bringing particular issues to the attention of legislators.”439 That was the brand of governance of their day.
In the Philippines today, individuals and groups seeking relief, assistance or redress of grievances send their petitions not to Congress, but to the Supreme Court.
The Court, in turn, has relaxed the doctrines of standing and the like, in order to accommodate within our Constitutional framework this felt need for judicial activism and governance.
Recently, the Supreme Court in its exercise of judicial activism and governance has deemed too restrictive the confines of an actual case and controversy, and has ventured outside the canals of decision-making and into the yet uncharted oceans of rulemaking and convening.
Among these recent initiatives are its convening of the National Consultative Summit on Extrajudicial Killings and Enforced Disappearances and the Forum on Increasing Access to Justice, as well as its promulgation of the cognate writs of Amparo and Habeas Data, the Rules of Procedure for Small Claims Cases, the Guidelines in the Observance of a Rule of Preference in the Imposition of Penalties in Libel Cases, and the Rule on Mandatory Legal Aid Service for Practicing Lawyers.
In so doing, our Supreme Court helms the ship of our Constitution between the rock of kritocracy and the whirlpool of public discontent with our government, to the distant haven of liberty. 438
Through this paper, the authors take the position that the Supreme Court’s exercise of extradecisional modes of judicial activism and governance fits well with the Judiciary’s role of representing minorities and protecting human rights.
In fact, our 1987 Constitution expressly calls for this exercise, and its reconfiguration of our own system of separated governmental powers structurally makes ample room for it.
In addition, Philippine political history and culture, with its emphasis on the core values of pakikisama, utang na loob, and personalism; primordial cultural importance of kinship affiliation; idealization of seemingly objective standards embodied in law alongside an aversion to any form of discretion and open ended decision-making; failure to develop not only a communal ideology by which to legitimize political decisions, but also an institution that can be trusted to make those decisions; and tradition and preference for a dominant national executive, supports a government of separated powers where the Supreme Court extradecisionally governs.
Our Supreme Court has cleverly put forward the idea of extradecisional judicial governance for public discussion in boldly undertaking the various initiatives discussed in this paper.
The Court has spurred debate, where its arguments consisted of the initiatives themselves, and their varying degrees of success.
In the end, what matters is the people’s opinion: ultimately the people’s judgment should prevail either by supporting these novel uses or by rejecting them as constituting an impermissible exercise of judicial power.
X x x.”
