What do you think is the relevance of the Dissenting Opinion of Justice Perfecto to the topic in Chapter 1 (The Case for Law)?

life and an turn law po nance. without resistance to the decision of the judge. Not so Michel Kohlhaas. After every means to obtain his rights, which have been most grievously violated, has been exhausted; after an act of sinful cabinet - justice has closed the way of redress to him, and Justice herself in all her representatives, even to the highest, has sided with injustice, a feeling of infinite woe overpowers him at R LAW the contemplation of the outrage that has been done him and he exclaims: 'Better be a dog, if I am to be trampled under foot, than a man'; and he says: The man who refuses me the protection of the law relegates me to the condition of the savage of the forest, and puts a club in my hand to defend myself with." He snatches the soiled sword out of the hand of such venal Justice and brandishes wal it in a manner that spreads consternation far and wide through the country, causes the Sate to shake to its very foundations and is the the prince to tremble on his throne. It is not, however, the savage "The feeling of vengeance that animates him; he does not turn murderer nwo and brigand, like Karl Moor, who wishes "to make the cry of revolt resound through all nature to lead into the fight against the race ibed of hyenas, air, earth and sea," whose wounded feeling of justice ense bing causes him to declare war against all humanity; but it is a moral than bus idea which urges him forward, the idea that "it is his duty to entire lego world to consecrate all his strength to the obtaining of satisfaction and to the guarding of his fellow-citizens against similar injustice." To this idea he sacrifices everything, his family's happiness, the honor of his name, all his earthly possessions, his blood, and his life; and he carries on no aimless war of extermination, for he syd directs it only against the guilty one, and against all those who make common cause with him. At last, when the hope of obtaining justice dawns upon him, he voluntarily down his arms; but, as if chosen to illustrate by example to what depth of ignominy the disregard of law and dishonor could descend at that time, the safe conduct given him, and the amnesty are violated, and he ends his life on the place bed of execution. However, before his life is taken from him justice is done him, and the thought that he has not fought in vain, that he has restored respect for the law and preserved his dignity as a human being, makes him smile at the horrors of death: and, reconciled with himself, the world, and God, he gladly and resolutely follows of 10 the executioner. What reflections does not this legal drama suggest: inor Here is an honest and good man, filled with love for his family, with a simple, religious disposition, who becomes an Attila and destroys with fire and sword the cities in which his enemy has taken refuge. And how is this transformation effected? By the very quality which lifts him morally high above all his enemies who finally triumph over him; by his high esteem for the law, his faith in its sacredness, the energy of his genuine, healthy feeling of legal right. The tragedy of his fate lies in this that his ruin was brought about by the superiority and nobility of his nature, his lofty feeling of legal right, and his heroic devotion to the ideal law, which madepurpose into gold, but CHAPTER I CASE READINGS A PHILOSOPHER-JURIST ON THE STRUGGLE FOR LAW PIO DURAN v. SALVADOR ABAD SANTOS a man (G.R. No. L-99, November 16, 1945) law rele puts a soiled it in a PERFECTO, J., dissenting: efrain from repeating the words the the co At this moment we cannot refrain the pr outstanding philosopher-jurist Jhering wrote in his little big book, "The feeling and b Struggle for Law": resou ""I crave the law. ' In those four words, the poet has described of hy the relation of law in the subjective, to law in the objective, sense caus of the term meaning of the struggle for law, in a manner better than idea any philosopher of the law could had done it. These four words change Shylock's claim into a question of the law of Venice. To what mighty, giant dimensions, does not the weak man grow, when he speaks these words: It is no longer the Jew demanding his pound of flesh; it is the law of Venice itself knocking at the door of Justice; for his rights and the law of Venice are one and the same; they both stand or fall together. And when he finally succumbs under the weight of the judge's decision, who wipes out his rights by a shocking piece of pleasantry, when we see him pursued by bitter scorn, bowed, broken, tottering on his way, who can help feeling that in him the law of Venice is humbled; that it is not the Jew, Shylock, who moves painfully away, but the typical figure of the Jew of the middle ages, that pariah of society who cried in vain for justice? His fate is eminently tragic, not because his rights are him, but because he, a Jew of the middle ages, has faith in the law - we might say just as if we were a Christian - a faith in the law firm as a rock which nothing can shake, and which the judge himself feels until the catastrophe breaks upon him like a thunderclap, dispels the illusion and teaches him that he is only the despise medieval Jew to whom justice is done by defrauding him." conoslos "The picture of Shylock conjures up another before may mind, the no less historical than poetical one of Michel Kohlhaas, which Heinrich von Dleist has described in his novel of that name with all the fascination of truth. Shylock retires from the scene entirely broken down by grief; his strength is gone and he bows 8 PhiLawsophia: Philosophy and Theory of Philippine Lawn which the arrogance him oblivious to all else and ready to sacrifice everything for it, in contact with the miserable world of the "holy by the venality and of the great and powerful was equaled only by cowardice of the judges. The crimes which he committed fall much more heavily on the prince, his functionaries and his judges who forced him out of the way of the law into the way of lawlessness For no wrong which man has to endure, no matter how grievous, can at all compare, at least in the eyes of ingenuous moral feeling, with that which the authority established by God commits when itself violates the law. Judicial murder is the deadly sin of the law. The guardian and sentinel of the law is changed into its murderer; the physician strangles his ward. In ancient Rome, the corrupt judge was punished with death. For the justice which has violated the law there is no accuser as terrible as the sombre, reproachful form of the There criminal made a criminal by his wounded feeling of legal right - it wealth wil is its own bloody shadow. The victim of corrupt and partial justice is driven almost violently out of the way the executor of his own commerce rights, and it not infrequently happens that, overshooting the mark, politics w he becomes the sworn enemy of society, robber and a murderer. If, like Michael Kohlhaas, his nature be noble and moral, it may guard him satisfaction. Here the struggle for law becomes a criminal, and by suffering the penalty of his crime, a martyr to his feeling of legal right. It is said that the blood of martyrs does not flow in vain, and the saying may have been true of him. It may be that his warning shadow sufficed for a long time to make the legal oppression of which he was victim an impossibility." "In conjuring up this shadows, I have desired to show by a SOC striking example how far the very man whose sentiment of legal right strongest and most ideal may go astray when the imperfection of legal institutions refuses him satisfaction. Here the struggle against the law. The feeling of legal right, left in the lurch by the . ! ! power which should protect it, itself abandons the ground of the law and endeavors, by helping itself, to obtain what ignorance, bad will, or impotence refuse it. And it is not only a few very strong and violent characters, in which the national feeling of legal right raise its protest against such a condition of things, but this protest is sometimes repeated by the whole population under certain forms, which according to their object or to the manner in which the whole people or a definite class look upon them, or apply them, the institutions of the state." may be considered as popular substitutes for, and accessories to