My classmate, Andy Bautista, was our class valedictorian and he got a good score on the Bar exams. Yet, he was the first-ever chair of the Commission on Elections to be impeached (courtesy of yours truly, his classmate of average grades), and is now in the United States facing several criminal indictments. What am I driving at? Not because one got the highest grades in law school, or was appointed to high office, does it mean that one has become an expert in the law.

The many juridical issues that have come to the fore in our country’s life recently — abusive legislative inquiries, the extraordinary rendition of former President Duterte, the Vice President’s impeachment — have given rise to a slew of legal experts. I am not talking about Google lawyers of the Dan Fernandez variety but actual lawyers who, having gotten excellent grades in law school and the bar through rote and/or having been elected or appointed to high office or founded big law firms, begin to publicly brand themselves, explicitly or implicitly, as intellectual giants. Worse, they start believing their own branding after having successfully made a few people believe it.

But, as they say, walls do not a prison make, or media hype a maestro. It is the persistent and exhaustive study of jurisprudence that leads to correct pronouncements of legal conclusions, unfettered and unswayed by bias, that doth make a legal luminary. One such person was the late Supreme Court Justice Abraham Sarmiento.

Notwithstanding that his son, an activist, was brutally killed during the reign of Marcos Sr. for opposing his government, Sarmiento voted — in a landmark case to determine whether or not Marcos Sr. should be allowed to return to the Philippines — in favor of the late President. In so doing, he relied on the Constitution and ruling case law interpreting the same in siding with the minority, in a majority ruling considered an aberration by many.

When I criticized Leila de Lima for her smug opinions on the powers of the Supreme Court to inquire into the circumstances surrounding the impeachment of the Vice President, I said that she “was not a legal luminary,” implying that her analysis could not be trusted.

In retort, her supporters told me, in effect, that neither was I. Which was strange — because I never claimed to be one. I merely pointed out that she lost most — if not all — of the important cases she was involved in. And in at least three of those cases the plunder and electoral sabotage cases against former President Arroyo and a certiorari case regarding the jurisdiction of her drug trafficking cases, all before the Supreme Court — she got her ass handed to her by poor little old undistinguished law student me.

In sum, all of these opinions, some by former high-ranking magistrates, so-called leaders of the Bar, and self-proclaimed experts such as De Lima, are oftentimes worth no more than those of the average Filipino, many of whom are surprisingly insightful. These prominent legal personalities, blinded by bias, are nothing more than crazy commentators, naught but legal loonies.