Art Panganiban

The Rotary Club of Manila honors today, as its guest speaker, the former jurist and chief Justice Art Panganiban.

In the course of my 53 years of journalism, I have been acquainted with and befriended a number of iconic individuals because of their singular background, remarkable achievements, and their impact and influence on society and the nation in general.

Such people are what I call tycoons. Tycoon means a powerful person in business or industry or the professions. In Japan, shoguns were those in power between 1857 and 1868.

Among the tycoons I have met, befriended and closely monitored as a journalist are: the late Henry Sy Sr., the late John Gokongwei Jr., the late Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco Jr., Ramon S. Ang, Manny Pangilinan, Lucio Tan, Tessie Sy Coson, Manny Villar, Enrique Razon, to name a few.

I put Art Panganiban in that rarified league of tycoons. He is my kind of shogun.

A shogun is actually a ruler. CJ Art ruled the tourism business for 20 years, as president of the largest travel agency company then, Baron Travel Corp. That is where I met Art for the first time. He was a travel business star, I was a journalist, or to be more precise, a travel journalist, being once a travel and tourism editor of a major daily.

Long before the Miss Universe pageants became the vogue, Art already had his Miss Baron Travel beauty contests. Its winners were the best candidates as future trophy wives, for their beauty, their intelligence, and sway over men like Art Panganiban. The Miss Baron Travel winners attracted men of manners, mien, and means.

To be sure, Art is an intellectual giant in his own right. He graduated with honors in elementary and high school, summa cum laude in pre-law, cum laude in Law, and finished No. 6 in the 1960 Bar.

Art spent 11 years in the Supreme Court, 10 years as a justice and one year as Chief Justice. I consider him possibly our best Supreme Court justice ever. He is the High Court’s most prolific writer.

He wrote more than 1,200 decisions, on top of a 100 minute resolutions. In effect, Art was writing 100 decisions a year or an average of one decision every three working days. His decisions gave substance and value to law and jurisprudence and had a grave impact on the nation.

To this day, nobody has surpassed CJ Art’s record of decision-making. He is, as the Supreme Court itself declared when Art retired, the “most prolific writer of the Court, bar none.” Art has also written books – one book a year for the last 14 years.

Art is veritably a national hero. In 2001, he saved the country from the imminent possibility of a military takeover or a coup d’ etat. On Jan. 20, 2001, there was turmoil in the land. Crowds were gathering in key sections of Manila, one group to assault the Palace and the other to defend it. Fairly or unfairly, President Joseph Estrada was accused of plunder in high office.

At 5:30 in the morning of January 2001, Justice Art Panganiban woke the chief justice, Hilario Davide up from his sleep and the two rushed to the Supreme Court at Padre Faura. The two decided to declare the presidency vacant and to have Vice President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo sworn in as “acting” president.

GMA, as you know, went on to preside over the longest economic expansion in the history of this country – a total of 36 consecutive quarters of uninterrupted growth.

CJ Art’s other distinction is as a journalist. He was a cub reporter in college. He would have been an editor at FEU but the administration had this policy of making students choose between being student paper editor or student leader. Art chose leadership, and co-founded the National Union of Students, the most powerful student leaders group in his college days.

While earning a degree, Art earned money the old-fashioned way, by peddling and delivering newspapers door-to-door every day. He was a newsboy. Nowadays, that role has been taken over by the internet and Google.

Art has been writing columns every week for 52 weeks a year, in the last 17 years, without fail, without any vacation, despite foreign travels, death in the family, or illness on his part. No one in the Inquirer has that 100 percent record.

This is why when the Manila Overseas Press Club (MOPC) launched its first ever Journalism Awards in 78 years this year, one of the leading candidates for the plum was Art Panganiban. He is the MOPC “Journalist of the Year–Law.”

The MOPC citation read: “For his prolific work and prodigious excellence in writing about law and justice with depth, clarity, and command of language, thereby strengthening the people’s faith in the third and often misunderstood branch of government, the judiciary. He is today the No. 1 columnist of the Inquirer. He has written 12 [should be 14] books on law, faith, and the Supreme Court.”

In his acceptance speech, Art lauded three what he called “Mega Media Movers” to whom he said, he owed the precious MOPC recognition at the sunset of his humble life: MOPC chair Antonio “Tony” Lopez, retired Inquirer chair Marixi R. Prieto, and GMA Network chair and CEO Felipe “Henry” L. Gozon.

Rushing from an important board meeting (Art is a director of some 20 companies or enterprise), he dutifully attended the event and received the MOPC trophy on Oct. 25, 2023.

The trophy is 15 inches and 3 kilos in weight. The MOPC trophies are “specially designed, gleaming golden bells. They were ordered in Italy and flown into Manila for the occasion. Italy is home to the world’s oldest and best bell-manufacturing technology, dating back a thousand years.

Each trophy symbolizes freedom, excellence, achievement, glory, and perfection of craft.

Congratulations, my tycoon, my shogun, my idol, Chief Justice Art Panganiban.

My shogun Art, when shall come such another?

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