Leonen says no to chief justice post

Supreme Court (SC) Associate Justice Marvic Leonen on Thursday said he does not aspire to become the country's chief magistrate.

Leonen, the eighth most senior justice of the SC at 55, said the chief justice post "requires some sort of a capacity or an attitude that right now I cannot imagine myself doing."

"You have to be able to find a middle ground, you have to have the gravitas to be able to bring people to listen to each other and then later on, come out with the decision," he said in an interview over ANC television.

"Right now, I am more concerned about convincing people about the standpoint that I am presenting."

Instead, Leonen, formerly dean of the University of the Philippines College of Law and chief negotiator of the Philippine government with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, urged his more senior, court-experienced colleagues to accept their nomination for the vacant office.

Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio, Associate Justices Presbitero Velasco Jr., Teresita Leonardo-de Castro, Diosdado Peralta and Lucas Bersamin, the five most senior SC justices, are automatically nominated for the post subject to their acceptance after the ouster of ex-chief justice Maria Lourdes Sereno.

Carpio earlier expressed he will decline all nominations, saying he does not want to benefit from the SC decision that stripped Sereno of her title and which he voted against.

The Integrated Bar of the Philippines and former chief justice Hilario Davide Jr., however, have endorsed Carpio's nomination.

In the television interview, Leonen acknowledged the importance of seniority in the SC and in the position of chief justice, and positively described the magistrates who were automatically nominated.

Carpio has been at the SC "for more than a decade;" De Castro is a "work horse and has a lot of good ideas;" Peralta is "one of the leading lights for continuous trials" and "gets people to work together;" and Bersamin is "somebody that can get well with colleagues" and has experienced working from lower courts, Leonen said.

Seniority, though "not, per se, the only requirement," is a "marker of experience," he said.

"Seniority is important because you mature as you are in a deliberative body. It is normal if you are new in a court, a collegiate court that you will feel threatened if somebody disagrees with you. I think that’s normal but as you go along, you learn to sit back a little and listen and be able to discern the points," he said.

"A chief justice must be able to do that ten times over. Ten times more than the colleagues. Which means that you have very strong positions because you are senior on something but you have to be able to step back and allow all the justices to be able to weigh in because the chief justice is supposed to be the negotiator," he added.

The mark of a "good" chief justice is "the number of times that she or he gets a unanimous opinion, especially in controversial cases, because this would mean that he or she could have work the many opinions that are on the table and found a middle ground," he said. — Nicole-Anne C. Lagrimas/RSJ, GMA News