Our justice system continues to be under fire. Delays and corruption are not funny lawyer jokes—they are dead serious, people are dying. What lies in the heart of it all is the writing of decisions. Our Constitution requires each decision to give the material facts and to clearly explain the reason and basis for a finding. The purpose is to avoid the arbitrariness (and foolishness) of processes during the Marcosian era. Where has this brought us?

Statistics are not reliable in the Philippines for we are not known for our note-taking or our documentation. From anecdotal evidence, the average time for a case to be resolved in the first-layer courts, not counting the appeal, is three to five years. In the Department of Justice, an ordinary case mandated to be finished in 60 days can run to years.

The difficult part is collating all the pieces of documents submitted over several hearings and sometimes running up to several feet high and picking out the relevant portions which, in itself, is both a linguistic and mental challenge. Research is conducted to find the applicable laws and jurisprudence. Lucky if they four- square; unlucky if it is a novel issue. The assumption is that our law libraries are current and searchable like Google, which often are not. Then the writer sits down and crafts everything dug up into one resolution that should reasonably be short or long depending on the case. All the time we need to find the needle of truth and to dispense justice to parties without fear or favor. For the innocents, it only means to ignore ignoble attempts to influence the decision one way or another.

And then there are the initials and the signatories. If a person is on leave or on meetings, the case will have to wait. There is no built-in redundancy that allows cases to move regardless of the incumbents. The irony is that cases that are ready and ripe for signing are actually passed on to the next office holder if the present one retires, resigns or otherwise leaves. There ought to be a definite requirement for clearance of no pending case to avoid backlogs and to do away with the mentality that “since my term is ending, I will just sit on the cases until I go away.” I mean we already have so much bureaucracy; this is one red tape we don’t need.

The anatomy of a decision is directly related to the length of time needed to issue it. As it stands, there is no systematic or rational approach to studying how we can improve the decision-writing process. This does not as yet include a methodical approach to the decision-making process which includes the non-technical and human aspects.

“On or about 5 p.m. of the 7th of November 2007, the said accused, in the City of Manila and within the jurisdiction of the Honorable Court, did then and there, unlawfully and feloniously, had carnal knowledge with Eva, 16 years of age, against her will and without her consent, by pointing a bladed weapon against her …” Contrary to law. Sounds pretty simple and that is one paragraph only.

In many countries, there is a trend towards modernizing legal terminologies and to make them more layman in tone and thus friendlier. There is no greater meaning of access to justice than for Tomas, Don and Juan to be able to understand the charge against him.

In our work now with the Supreme Court Committee on Revision of Rules, this is precisely what we are trying to do. Whether we can achieve it or not depends on many factors, the most important being our mindsets. We grew up and learned this path of law and know no other body other than this anatomy.