By Atty. Eduardo T. Reyes III Appearing before a panel of three (3) magistrates in one of the divisions of the Sandiganbayan along Commonwealth Avenue, Quezon City, a defense counsel was pleading for his client’s liberty by invoking “merciful justice” when the presiding magistrate questioned him: “But what do you mean by merciful justice,
January 11, 2021
By Atty. Eduardo T. Reyes III Just when everybody thought that their mood had been lightened up by the break of the new year that supposedly came with a sanguine promise of a much better year than the one being left behind, 2021 instead was ushered in by a horrendous crime that took place
January 7, 2021
By Atty. Eduardo T. Reyes III With the upsurge in real estate dealings involving land development for mixed-use purposes in the Philippines that started and eventually saturated the metropolis, and now spread its tentacles to the countryside, sales and mortgages of vast tracts of land have become banal. Assuredly, bigger acquisitions of lands are
January 6, 2021
By Atty. Eduardo T. Reyes III The unfortunate incident in Tarlac this December brought to the fore the colliding interests between the right to create noise and the right not to tolerate noise. (But of course, as already emphasized in part 1 of this article, resorting to violence is never justified even under the
December 29, 2020
By Atty. Eduardo T. Reyes III As the year 2020 is drawing to a close, tragedy and irony struck when a policeman felled a mother and son with government-issued bullets fired from a gun purchased with public funds supposedly intended to protect the citizenry. As if 2020 was not bad enough with covid-19 striking
December 28, 2020
By Atty. Eduardo T. Reyes III Just three to go and Christmas will be upon us. It is doubtful though whether Santa Claus will be coming to town this time around as his reindeers may be practicing some social-distancing and might be skipping Christmas for the year 2020. But Santa’s magic is not only
December 22, 2020
By Atty. Eduardo T. Reyes III In War and Peace, an epic novel written by Leo Tolstoy, he described how husband and wife should ideally converse, thus: “Natásha and Pierre, left alone, also began to talk as only a husband and wife can talk, that is, with extraordinary clearness and rapidity, understanding and expressing each other’s
December 9, 2020
By Atty. Eduardo T. Reyes III If “the eyes are the window to the soul”, as the aphorism goes, then perhaps it may be said that the windows are the eyes for the soul to see the world outside (or to pry into the neighbor’s property). And with CCTV cameras becoming ubiquitous, then a
December 5, 2020
By Atty. Eduardo T. Reyes III Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel Never-ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel Like a snowball down a mountain, or a carnival balloon Like a carousel that’s turning running rings around the moon Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
December 1, 2020
By Atty. Eduardo T. Reyes III APART from the Vatican (which is mostly comprised of men of the cloth), the Philippines seems to be the only other nation in the globe that has no absolute divorce law. It could be surmised that perhaps Filipinos are punctiliously ruled by social conventions or heavily influenced by
November 24, 2020
By Atty. Eduardo T. Reyes III The adoption and implementation of the Quick Response (QR) code as a system of data-gathering to contact-trace persons infected (or at least reasonably suspected to be infected) with Covid-19 is gaining traction among local government units (LGUs) across the country. For starters, the QR code is a bar-code
November 19, 2020
By Atty. Eduardo T. Reyes III In the Law of Succession, it has been said that love first descends, then ascends, and then goes sideways. This references the order of hereditary rights when a person dies leaving several heirs to partake of his estate. His/ her descendants (ie, children and grandchildren down the line) are
November 14, 2020