THE very first question of the 1991 Bar Examinations dumbfounded the whole legal community: "What is a Constitutional writ of amparo and what is the basis for such a remedy under the Constitution?"

For weeks thereafter, members of the bar were talking of nothing else but Amparo and what "she" had done to tatter further the examinees’ already frayed nerves, and what they had in the first place done to Amparo to deserve such an excruciating interrogation.

Sixteen long years later, the legal community was again abuzz with that enigmatic Amparo, this time because the Supreme Court en banc, on October 16, 2007, had issued a Resolution establishing the Rule on the Writ of Amparo. All of a sudden, it became the fashionable and favored intellectual phrase to drop in tete-a-tetes among lawyers.

The mind behind that inscrutable question, and the spirit behind that noble Rule, clearly belong to a man way ahead of his time in a profession whose cornerstone is dogma – Justice Adolfo S. Azcuna.

I have always counted myself terque quaterque beatus that Justice Azcuna was my venerable professor in International Law at the Ateneo Law School, and my esteemed colleague in the Supreme Court. In both fora, he was a veritable sage among sages, a Gamaliel and a Maimonides all rolled into one. The association has all been for the better for his fourteen peers.

I was in my early 20’s when I learned my international law from Justice Azcuna. I distinctly recall that he held us, his students, entranced and in great awe of his grand mastery of and delightful passion for the subject. He guided us through the complicated transborder terrain of international law. But more than that, he prodded us to search for and to find new avenues to a better understanding of international conflicts in the era and context of protectionist trade and the Cold War. As a consequence, we developed and acquired breadth and depth of perspective in the study of our legal system, an indispensable tool for our country which was then getting integrated into the backrooms and boardrooms of the international markets.

It therefore came as no surprise to us that Justice Azcuna would later earn a post-graduate certificate in International Law from Salzburg University in Austria. He went on to publish such landmark academic works as "International Sales of Goods," "Foreign Judgment [Monetary] Enforcements in the Philippines" and "ASEAN Conflict of Law." These works are still being authoritatively cited even up to the present.

Justice Azcuna was a major influence in directing my academic interests. I vividly remembered his lectures when I was taking my LL.M. in Harvard Law School where the focus of my own scholarly pursuits was foreign investment policies and the regulation of international corporate and financial institutions.

After many years in the classroom and private law practice, Justice Azcuna took on a new challenge in the arena of our nation’s political life. He holds the singular distinction of having helped write two charters – the 1973 and the 1987 Constitutions. This has indubitably qualified him as an authority par excellence on Constitutional Law.

Justice Azcuna’s insightful grasp of the fundamental law has been his distinct cutting edge as a member of the Supreme Court where I deliberated with him on numerous cases involving constitutional issues. The significance of his opinion in Chavez vs. Comelec continues to resonate to this day. The case involved the constitutionality of a Comelec resolution banning propaganda materials such as billboards containing product endorsements by candidates. In upholding the validity of the resolution, Justice Azcuna wrote:

xxxx If the subject billboards were to be allowed, candidates for public office whose name and image are used to advertise commercial products would have more opportunity to make themselves known to the electorate, to the disadvantage of other candidates who do not have the same chance of lending their faces and names to endorse popular commercial products as image models. Similarly, an individual intending to run for public office within the next few months, could pay private corporations to use him as their image model with the intention of familiarizing the public with his name and image even before the start of the campaign period.

We stood on opposite sides in Lambino vs. Comelec, et al. but, despite the variance of our positions on the issues raised, I can unequivocally say that rebutting his arguments proved to be a most arduous and formidable task. Such was the extraordinary intellect he manifested in the ponencias he delivered on behalf of the Court.

I would now like to write about Adolfo S. Azcuna, the man, shorn of all that will in time pass, like grass blown away by the wind. In my mind’s eye, I perceive him as a person of perfect good breeding who has always lived up to his knowledge. Many have acquired knowledge but few have attained wisdom as a consequence of that knowledge. In Adolfo S. Azcuna, knowledge and wisdom are one and the same.

Two quotations, paraphrased from the quintessential classical Roman lawyer of lawyers, Marcus Tullius Cicero, perfectly fit, hand in glove, Adolfo S. Azcuna, as a justice and as a man: To him, "nothing is expedient but what is right… (He) is blinded by (his) passion for high ideals."

All told, academic and professional achievements are one thing but what a person is is yet, and still, an entirely different matter. In the end, Adolfo S. Azcuna will be remembered simply as a good and decent man – and one of the truly remarkable justices who ever sat in the Supreme Court.

Manila, February 10, 2009.

Written for Volume 53, Issue No. 4, of the Ateneo Law Journal, March 2009, on the occasion of his retirement from the Supreme Court on February 16, 2009.

G.R. No. 162777, August 31, 2004.

G.R. No. 174153, October 25, 2006.