SOMEONE said that the rule of law is only as good as the men who enforce it, and obedience to such men turns entirely on the public esteem they enjoy, though obedience is to the office and not the men as someone of any education knows.

Still, if true, Edward Coke and Francis Bacon, servants of the Stuart kings and submissive to a more tyrannical parliament, two men of the law, of small integrity but large intelligence, would not have laid the modern foundations of law and liberty.

Both men took bribes, curried favored with the strong, and bent their talents to the wrong purposes of whoever paid or whoever they feared the most.

But both men shine in the pantheon of politics because, when they were not bad, they made good decisions that made good law, elevating it above the poor quality of the officials enforcing it, demanding for law and legal institutions unswerving allegiance, unwavering obedience and unfailing respect. Arguing from the better angels of our nature, to borrow Lincoln’s phrase, they showed that the highest master is law—even when no one in authority upholds it.

A king was only a king if he obeyed the laws that made him king, servant of justice, enforcer of the law and dispenser of mercy.

The king’s own courts invoked the king’s own prerogative in the King’s Bench to defeat his unreasonable orders. A king was only a king if he upheld the law, all the more so a president.

God was no exception. Lilburne said, “God himself bindeth himself by his laws.” The only exception was a miracle by which God suspended nature’s law, and mercy by which the king rose above law to the imitation of Christ. The courts in England contented against their respective jurisdictions for the right to make decisions not just on law but on higher equity because compassion set a higher, wiser standard than law. Men being fallible—as lawmakers and judges, the world being what it is, corrupt and prone to prejudice, the last great hope of justice is the Christian heart.

The rule of law is no misnomer, as an ignorant man might argue. It is what deep students of law have known. Law does not depend on the quality of the men who invoke or enforce it. Law is law, deciding for posterity, if not the present, what is right and wrong.

True, the rule of law needs the power of men to be enforced but it survives such men to inform the judgment of those who succeed them.

Though GMA acted according to law, her successor can still question the correctness of her actions. But not from prejudice but by law.

Raw power has no place in government. To act in and through government power must be vested with authority and authority derives from law.

Men in office may discredit themselves. The office is not discredited as a result. Institutions are owed respect separate from the men who use or misuse them. Hence the Supreme Court must punish for contempt, all 15 justices of it with no dissent. Any who dissent fail in their highest duty to protect from insult and subversion their branch of government under a separation of powers.

An impartial legal order is not a fiction, as one might be tempted to argue because justice owns a pair of scales and holds only a borrowed sword. It is the reality that has outlived every government out to subvert it, like this one. It is government whose power is fiction when decent society is disgusted, the army defects, and the people dance in the streets.

I have no affection for this Court, which denied justice to the victims of martial law. It ruled that brave men, like my father, cannot conceivably be coerced by arrest and detention under martial law to sign away their properties—like newspapers, power companies, PCI Bank—unless they prove they were cowards.

Though old, or perhaps because old, the justices could imagine a free and consenting will inside a prison. The same Court ruled that mocking Cory’s enemies for joining a rebellion against her is libel. These are justices? Still they are the Supreme Court.

Aquino did not boldly challenge a dysfunctional state of affairs, as someone described the justice system today because of the corruption of the justices—a contemptible view for which he is protected because he has no legal credentials to lose. Noynoy is not a psychiatrist, though he claims to a knowledge of it as only a psychiatrist—or a patient—could acquire. He defied the separation of powers and the power of judicial review—impeachable offenses even if this Congress cannot muster the numbers to do what is right in law.

The House of Lords let the unpopular Earl of Clarendon escape a hold-departure order and a warrant of arrest from Parliament because, and I quote, “it is against natural justice and reason that a person accused should be punished before he knows his crime.”

The government’s charges against GMA remain only works in progress, including the railroaded complaint of a committee unconstitutionally conjoined.

True, the rule of law holds in societies where justices are esteemed higher than politicians. More so should it hold in societies where the reverse is the case. Law and justice should call the shots even when they do not for the moment prevail.

Public esteem has nothing to do with law. Public-opinion surveys only measure the breadth of ignorance out there. Addressing legal and moral issues with surveys is like casting pearls before swine and expecting pigs to string them into a necklace: impossible with three fat fingers.

Time and again, the Arroyo-appointed court struck down initiatives that favored her—from people’s initiative to Executive Order  464 in challenges mounted by so-called allies like Joker Arroyo but though not by so-called political foes like Noynoy who voted for all her initiatives. He was rewarded with a deputy speakership.

Gratitude—of the majority or the minority—is not a sound basis for casting a judicial vote. But ingratitude is worse. A justice who rules against the power that appointed him to pander to the power that succeeded her, lacks decency as well as justice.

GMA appointed a new chief justice after the election of her successor but not before the end of her term. It was her prerogative to appoint and show that, between the election of her successor and his assumption of office, there was no vacuum of power, no lapse of authority that invited chaos. If she left the choice to her successor, she would have scored one for delicadeza, zero for political wisdom.

It was not GMA who toppled Estrada whose deportment disgusted Cory. He was toppled by Cory, Joker, Manny Villar, Erap’s allies in Congress, civil society, FVR and Rene de Villa who met with Cory, the Church, the generals, and of course the rockers at the corner of Edsa and Ortigas.

Estrada was arrested not by GMA but by operation of law.

Not GMA but a press devoid of decorum humiliated Erap by publishing his mug shots. Estrada should not forget who let him go, first to Hong Kong and then for good. No other president would face down vindictive civil society to do it.

It is ignorant to complain that none of these events brought Arroyo even close to prison. But she violated no law, forgetting only good manners in letting them happen, like stripping away the small security from the ailing woman who made her president. Bad taste.

Public esteem gives substance to raw power, military support gives it claws, but only law creates political power, which is something else altogether.

On the other hand, to be fair, Noynoy did not mess up GMA’s neck, it was her native doctors who are praying she will recover from their malpractice without going abroad to prove it.

Public esteem adds nothing to the validity of laws, to the respect that is due them, and the obedience that the courts are owed.

If public esteem played any role in law and justice, then Gandhi and Ninoy—who suffered under very popular, not to say beneficial tyrannies, like a civilizing Empire and a brilliant Marcos, were wrong. Those who do not study law should not speak of it. Whereof you do not know, thereof you should keep silent. Wittgenstein, sort of.