"The Reliance is Misplaced"

When the esteemed retired Supreme Court Justice V. V. Mendoza condescendingly quipped in his Judicial Review class that the principal research tool of today’s law students is no longer “American Jurisprudence” nor “Corpus Juris Secundum” nor “Philippine Reports” nor “SCRA”, but “Google”, no one was quick and sharp enough a-la Oscar Wilde to have dandily retaliated with a resounding “No, sir. It’s Lawphil!”

Although www.lawphil.net, among other conveniences of modernity, has irresistibly revolutionized the method of legal research and menacingly looms to potentially render mammoth hardbound SCRA libraries unnecessary and obsolete, it is not without an insidious and deleterious touch to its patrons, I think. Just as Leonidas lamented of the oracles in the enthralling movie “300”, “their beauty is their curse,” Lawphil.net’s beauty is its curse – not to itself, but to its users. (aptly called, say, Lawphiles?)

With only a nebulous recollection of keywords pegged to or associated with a legal concept in the researcher’s memory and the mechanical inputting of those keywords onto Lawphil.net’s search bar, the researcher finds himself instantly faced with a drowning plethora of cases, statutes and other sources containing those keywords, whether or not in physical proximity or in logical coherence with one another. Thus, the tedious search for embellishing, or perhaps, riddling pleadings with citations can be said to have become worth only child’s play. Try searching, for example, “Gordian Knot” or the “Sword of Damocles” for a dab of literary imagery or palabok in pleadings.

But, it seems that in the drunkenness of ease and speed, the exquisite importance of aptness is forgotten; that is, citing the apt cases in support of arguments and discussions in pleadings. I suppose that there exists a perfectly human tendency to imperfectly cite cases, lifting therefrom quotes, phrases or doctrines, without perusing the context or the factual milieu in which they were used. And while this might truly be innocuous in most instances, it could very well be, perhaps, the selfsame reason for the increasingly becoming common admonition of the Supreme Court, that the reliance (on a particular case) is misplaced.

Perhaps, citations, though sparse, yet on target, should be the ultimate “acquired taste” of a researcher crafting his magnum opus of a pleading, whenever he can afford to. Finding a case that snugly fits on all fours with the researcher’s equates to finding just the right key to fit the hole.

Raul Grapilon

Entry No. 11

Why is it that I always read lawandict.blogspot.com as lawaddict.blogspot.com?