The Bar Topnotchers

A unique class of people in the Philippines is the Bar Topnotchers.  They are the men and women who are accorded this title by the trimedia and the public, the morning after the announcement of the results of the Bar exams, itself a mystical event fraught with national anxiety. A list of names and those of their colleges, below ID photos, with their respective grades exquisitely calibrated to the last decimal place, appears on all the front pages, video screens and bulletin boards; and is read and exclaimed over radio, in waiting rooms, coffee shops and churches all over the land.

From the moment of their coronation, these worthies walk on air, and sometimes on water, too, for the honorific, Bar Topnotcher, is affixed to their names till the day they die and beyond. In the late 19th century, towards the end of the Spanish regime, their counterparts were called “abogados de campanilla” for, when they condescended to appear on the dusty streets of Manila, they were preceded by a couple of pages, or bellboys, shaking little metal bells to frighten off less distinguished pedestrians into getting out of their way. It was the same honor given to the Viaticum, when a priest, carrying the Sacred Host, was on his way to give the Last Sacraments to the dying. Nowadays, the bells have been replaced by sirens from a Lexus, or at least a Ford Expedition, and other modern forms of preeminence.

Those who merely merited a passing grade in the Bar exams (which fluctuate according to the exigent whims of the Bar examiners) are also listed on that momentous day, on a much longer list, in smaller type, but are nevertheless entitled to the less aristocratic title of “Atty.” (short for “Attorney”) and are idolized by families, hometowns and their soon-to-be constituents. Those grueling exams, after several months of exhausting, monkish existence as Bar reviewers, are said to be harder for the tens of thousands of lawyers and law students to answer correctly than for that Biblical camel to pass through the eye of the needle.

In any case, they are all, whether Bar Topnotchers or Attys., rewarded by a crack at the presidency, the Senate, the Supreme Court, any position in the government roster and great wealth and glory; so that it is imperative for every Filipino family to have at least one. History provides us with an explanation for this phenomenon, and its fascinating background.

Filipino law students and lawyers, in their feverish hundreds of thousands, are the descendants of the armies of notaries, jurists and functionaries who manned the emerging empires around the Mediterranean in the 15th and 16th centuries. As such, they are the direct inheritors of a complex legacy, Muslim and Christian, which has come down to us from those remote times.

Long before the Spanish conquista in Mindanao, Sulu and those parts of Luzon that were becoming Islamized, there was substantial legislative activity sustained by a special class of learned interpreters of the Koran, jurists and missionaries who guided the people through the intricacies of law.

They and only they knew “right” from “wrong” — in almost the same way that highly-paid corporation lawyers now claim to know it — and they instructed their clients on such matters as dietary taboos, ablutions and burials. They were in reality distant echoes of the Muslim empires whose legal machinery was so impressive that, to take only one example, King Henry VIII of England sent a mission to Suleiman at Constantinople to “study its workings.”

According to Fernand Braudel (The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Vol. II), the domain of the Catholic kings, Ferdinand and Isabella, was also managed by such lawyers or letrados, new men whose profession was the study of the law “whose competence extended to all matters, being no more nor less than the science of what is just and unjust.” Hurtado de Mendoza, diplomat, soldier and aristocrat, enumerated “the entire tribe” (and their names have a familiar ring to students of Philippine history): the oidores for civil cases, presidentes, members of the audiencias and the supreme court or the Consejo-Real.

In Europe, the lawyers began as a threat to, and in the end, the destroyers of, the aristocracy and the military (in those days synonymous), being men from lower “urban or rural classes,” “sons of shoemakers and plowmen.”  For instance, a royal clerk “of extremely modest origin,” Palacios Rubios was the lawyer who drafted the Leyes de Indias (more honored in the breach but fondly quoted by Spanish apologists). And he “not even the son of an hidalgo (a member of the nobility)!” So much so that an irritated nobleman, Rodrigo de Vivero, noted with alarm that there were 70,000 law students in Spain during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella.

Braudel calls them “a new social category” of “immense political significance” that reinforced the power of the monarchs against the feudal nobles and thus contributed to the rise of the modern state in the Turkish and Spanish empires.

Perhaps because of their social insecurity, the letrados were also a new source of venality and corruption. “The need to (court) one’s superiors,” writes Braudel, “to offer them substantial gifts, obliged every state servant to reimburse himself regularly, at the expense of his inferiors and of the localities he administered and so on down the scale. The organized misappropriation of public funds operated throughout the hierarchy.”

The Spanish lawyers, clerks, notaries and other bureaucrats, together with their complicated paperwork, were, as we all know, transplanted to the Philippines and became, in many senses, Filipinized. The million of documents they composed and transcribed rot silently in our archives. Their peculiar functions, temperaments, ambitions and weaknesses are now part of Filipino life.

One lawyer’s sleight-of-hand has led to a pejorative term, “Law-fare,” a new form of warfare, because their use of their knowledge of the law and its intricacies has made them the new warriors. They wield the power of the sword. Make one mistake in a legal document or procedure and they’ll cut your head off.

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Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil is a founding, lifetime member of the National Press Club and chair of the Manila Historical and Heritage Commission.