The Weight of a Promise

A man walks into a lawyer's office and asks, "How much do you charge for legal advice?" The lawyer replies, "$500 for three questions." The man, startled, says, "Isn't that a bit steep?" The lawyer answers, "Yes it is. What's your third question?"

How many lawyers does it take to change a light bulb? Three - one to bill for the hour, one to argue over who broke the old bulb, and one to draft a memorandum on whether the new one creates any liability.

These are old, gentle jabs - and every lawyer in the Rotary Club of Manila has heard a version of these at a family dinner, usually from an uncle who then asks for free advice on getting his previous marriage annulled.

Jokes like these persist for a reason. They are the public's way of processing an old anxiety: that the profession entrusted with truth and fairness might, in the wrong hands, traffic in neither. That anxiety is precisely why the profession does not simply license lawyers - it makes them swear an oath. A license regulates conduct. An oath conscripts conscience.

Today, in the presence of fellow Rotarians, guests, and a Guest Speaker who are lawyers, it behooves asking what exactly that oath demands, where it came from, and why — jokes notwithstanding — it still matters.

Every lawyer admitted to practice in the Philippines takes an oath prescribed and administered under the authority of the Supreme Court. Its current form, the Revised Lawyer's Oath adopted under the 2023 Code of Professional Responsibility and Accountability (CPRA), replaced the older, more archaic formulation that had stood largely unchanged for generations. It is worth setting the operative elements out plainly, because each clause is a distinct promise, not decoration.

First, the lawyer swears to accept "the honor, privilege, duty, and responsibility of practicing law in the Philippines as an Officer of the Court, in the interest of our people." This opening line does something quietly radical: it frames the profession not as a private trade but as a public office, undertaken in the interest of people who are not paying clients.

Next, the lawyer professes fealty to the Constitution, the fundamental law of the Republic, and a commitment to "promoting the rule of law and a regime of truth, justice, freedom, love, equality, and peace." The inclusion of values like love and equality alongside the more familiar invocations of truth and justice marks a deliberate departure from the oath's older, more austere language. I just hope new lawyers will not use it as an excuse when they get caught up in complicated romantic entanglements.

Then, the lawyer commits to work for justice and to "safeguard the rights and meaningful freedoms of all persons, identities, and communities," and to work toward "greater and equitable access to justice." This is the clause that reaches beyond the courtroom into the reality that most people who need a lawyer cannot afford one.

This is followed by a promise to do no falsehood, and not to twist the law to unjustly favor or prejudice anyone. This is the clause that guards against the very caricature lawyer jokes rely on.

Finally, the lawyer pledges to faithfully perform these responsibilities "to the best of my ability, with integrity, and utmost civility," binding the lawyer not only to competence but to decency, including toward adversaries, "without mental reservation nor purpose of evasion."

The Supreme Court has been explicit that the lawyer’s oath is a sacred covenant, not a ceremonial observance. In Re: Petition of Al Argosino to Take the Lawyer's Oath (B.M. No. 712, March 19, 1997), the Court made clear that the oath is a standard against which a lawyer's conduct must be measured at all times, and that its breach is itself a ground for discipline. The oath does not merely open the door to the profession; it remains, for as long as one practices, its foundation.

The Court has not left that principle in the abstract. In a disbarment decision released in February 2024 (A.C. No. 13674), the Supreme Court struck a lawyer's name from the Roll of Attorneys for abandoning his wife and child to cohabit with, and later bigamously marry, another woman, and perhaps most damningly, for flaunting the affair publicly. The Court was unambiguous about why private conduct triggered a professional consequence: a lawyer who cannot honor the vows and laws that bind him in his own household forfeits the standing to be trusted with fidelity to the law in anyone else's affairs. It is a sobering illustration of just how far the oath's demand for integrity reaches, not merely in the courtroom or conference rooms, but into the whole of a lawyer's conduct, public and private alike.

The impulse to bind advocates by solemn promise is almost as old as advocacy itself. In the Roman Republic, orators like Marcus Tullius Cicero argued cases before the Senate and the courts, and in doing so helped invent the very vocabulary - advocatus, one called to stand beside another - the origin of the word "advocate". Cicero's defense of the accused, and his willingness to speak inconvenient truths to power at real personal cost, established a template still cited in law schools two thousand years later: that eloquence divorced from principle is merely noise, but eloquence in service of justice is the beginning of civilization.

Centuries later, in eighteenth-century England, Sir William Blackstone took the scattered, unwritten customs of the common law and organized them into his Commentaries on the Laws of England — a work so foundational that it shaped not only English jurisprudence but, through the American founders who read it closely, the constitutional architecture of the United States and, by extension, much of the common-law world the Philippines itself inherited. Blackstone did not merely practice law; he made law legible, teachable, and therefore accountable.

In the twentieth century, two barristers turned their legal training into instruments of liberation. Mohandas Gandhi, called to the English bar at the Inner Temple, practiced law in South Africa and India before turning the virtues his legal discipline taught him - patience, clarity in reasoning, uncompromising principles - into the architecture of a nonviolent movement that ended nearly two centuries of colonial rule. Nelson Mandela, one of South Africa's first Black lawyers, opened a law practice offering the poor a service they could otherwise never afford, before emerging from twenty-seven years of unjust imprisonment and leading his country on the road to reconciliation rather than revenge. Both men treated the lawyer's oath's oldest element - service in the interest of the people, not merely the client who can pay - as a life's mission rather than an empty promise.

Cicero, Blackstone, Gandhi, Mandela: an orator, a scholar, a liberator, a reconciler. Different eras, different continents, different fights. What unites them is that each, in his own way, answered the same question the oath still poses to every new lawyer: will the law you practice serve power, or will it serve people?

It is in that spirit that we welcome today's guest speaker, Amando Virgil Ligutan, Esq. While we should not expect him to fully match Cicero's eloquence, Blackstone's rigor, Gandhi's patience, or Mandela's fortitude all at once, we do hope that in the causes he has championed, the clients he has served, and the counsel he has given, Attorney Ligutan will prove himself a worthy inheritor of the oath those luminaries lived by: to do no falsehood, to serve the interest of the people before the interest of the few, and to treat the practice of law not as a trade to be practiced, but as a promise to be kept.