How to decide fast and easy

By Ulysses Raciles Butuyan
Executive Judge
Regional Trial Court, Tayug, Pangasinan 

Honestly, and lawyers never lie, it took me long and hard to decide on what to write. It took me even much longer to decide whether to write at all. That’s how indecisive I can get and I can’t even seem to figure out why.

Don’t be surprised. After all, I am one judge who is no different from a handful. Or even a boatload.

The stubborn fact is that I am compulsively a stereotyped thinker. That is, whenever I think I’m thinking. Addicted to citations, whether of the contemporary or archaic, I hardly realize that much of present jurisprudence is but a rehash of rulings past, and if there’s any substantial change, it’s likely because the ponente sports another name. The more I cite, the more authoritative I find my own decisions to be. I insist that a citation is all I need to decide an issue, but whether or not I know the issue is quite another matter.

Facts invariably confuse me, the evidence on record often intractable. Stenographers warp testimonies and the police mutilate so-called sworn statements into anguished contortions of grammar and vocabulary. Even the transcript of my open-court rulings sounds Greek. They usually are.

Then comes a retinue of friends, practitioners and politicians, behaving overly familiar for comfort. Unabashedly, some of them drop hints on how justice should be handed down, or what the law really means. Instantly my brightest dreams darken into nightmares. Others come like magi bearing gifts, mostly off-season. That is when I take a second look at my stunted paychecks.

Meanwhile, as I comb thru the cobwebs of my bookshelves, argue with the bungling stenographers and exchange hypocrisies with meddlers and lobbyists, my court docket of pending cases mounts. In no time I receive a pink memorandum from the court administrator demanding an explanation. Who says pink is romantic?

So, what have I done to improve my lot as an outstanding sluggard? Nothing to my credit, really. But at an ocular inspection where a heavy lunch was served and freshly halved coconuts substituted for water and dessert, I frantically looked around for a bowl to hold my share. The host, an unkempt farmer, apologetically regretted having forgotten to bring any. Eyebrows raised, I growled: “How, then, can I hold all this food?”  With a breath that was rich in sulfur, he whispered into my ear: “Sir, why don’t you use your coconut?”

As a judge, I’ve thence been striving to do precisely that.

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