Lamentillo Passes 2025 Bar, Pushes Linguistic Justice

Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo has passed the 2025 Bar Examination on her first attempt, fulfilling an eight-year promise she made to her late father — while deepening a cause she has carried for years: linguistic justice for Karay-a, Hiligaynon and other underrepresented language communities.

In a social media post after the results were released, Lamentillo traced the milestone back to a vow made in 2017. “Eight years ago, in 2017, my dad and I had our last conversation. Before he passed, I promised him I’d become a lawyer. I’ve carried that promise with me ever since — quietly, stubbornly, even on the days I wasn’t sure I could finish what I started.” She said she kept the promise alive even while overseas. “I brought law books with me to Oxford and studied in between everything because I couldn’t let that promise fade.”

She described taking the Bar as an emotional reckoning shaped by grief and memory. “This was my first time taking the Bar, and I walked into it thinking of him the whole way through,” she wrote. When her name appeared on the list, she marked the moment in simple, unvarnished words: “Today, more than eight years later, I finally get to put Atty. before my name. Dad, I kept my word. You can finally rest in peace.”

Yet for Lamentillo, fairness has never been confined to courtrooms. In Munich, at the One Young World Conference, she argued that language itself is a justice issue — one that determines who gets understood and who gets left out. Introducing herself to the audience, she said: “Mayad nga udto! Good afternoon! I am Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo, a Filipino from the Karay-a ethnolinguistic group in Western Visayas.” She recalled how English, her language of instruction, once felt like a barrier she had to fight through. “I was mocked; playmates mimicked my accent and stutter,” she said, adding that she learned to measure growth “not in perfect consonants, but in courage.” At home, she found strength in her mother tongue: “On nights when my tongue felt locked, my mother would whisper proverbs in Kinaray-a, and my mouth would loosen to the sounds — familiar, ours.”

That experience, she said, taught her an uncomfortable truth: “My struggle taught me this — words are not equal. Language is not fair.” She warned that the same imbalance now plays out in the digital world, where most languages remain invisible to major platforms. “When I tried speaking Kinaray-a to ChatGPT, it did not respond,” she told the Munich audience, before challenging the tech industry directly: “How can we call technology that only understands less than one percent of the world’s languages fair and responsible?”

Lamentillo’s path reflects the same persistence she described onstage. She graduated from UP Los Baños in 2012 with Latin honors and the Faculty Medal for Academic Excellence, earned her Juris Doctor from UP Diliman in 2020, completed executive education at Harvard Kennedy School in 2018, finished her MSc in Cities at the London School of Economics with honors in July 2025, and is currently pursuing an MSc in Major Programme Management at the University of Oxford.

Now officially an attorney, Lamentillo’s next chapter echoes the argument she made in Munich: justice is also the right to be understood —especially in Karay-a and Hiligaynon, and in every language communities refuse to let fall silent.