LIFESTYLE | Separation of Power by John S. Baker, Ph. D

Separation of Power in Constitution-Making

February 17, 2006 CSSP-AVR

The subject that I’ll be discussing is not only of interest to Charter Change but actually it’s probably more interesting to me in academic sense. For you it’s a matter of political life and death. For me, as an observer, I get to watch and learn not only about the Philippines but actually I understand the US Constitution better now having observed the Philippines. For instance, I never thought the idea of electing senators at large and now I understand what they do(es). They create a mess.


The term democracy today really means what the US government has. Unfortunately, some other countries northwardly in Latin Americas and I think, there are many similarities between the Philippines and Latin Americas. The Spanish colonial civil laws system, which can be a great source of great difficulty. I know because I live in the state that has the only civil law system in the US. And all our lawyers are required not only to study American, Anglo-American common law but they also get a degree in civil law. So many of those who want to go to law school in the Philippines. You just enroll in the right law school and come back here and do the same thing. Now it appears that you have the same problems that we have –too many lawyers. But the one thing you do have, you have a lot of nurses.

The world does not need anymore lawyers. The world needs a lot more nurses. But I want to focus on what the problem of our position is. Dr. Torres focuses on institution and institutions are extremely important in government and unfortunately constitution-makers often do not focus particularly enough on the constitution and I put forward the notion that a state that doesn’t have strong institution, in other words, a weak state or soft state like what the Philippines have which quite much alike the Americas have, are weak states we will never get any kind of good public order in a weak state. 

It may have been through 500 years ago, but today not only are you completely without of state you’re competing with other non-state organization. Now kind of, if you want to know you best worldwide which you in the Philippines you have your issue with the Moros in the South and your communist groups within the country. In Latin America they deal with drug case, they use gun-running and other smuggling operations. In the battle for weak states you think these are the organizations especially the drug ones are more powerful states than they are. Meaning a state is a form of organization and a cartel is a form of organization and if the state doesn’t have enough money because it doesn’t collect taxes but the drug kingpins are collecting all kinds of cash and they have all kinds of people on their payroll, they can dominate the state. 


So in looking at a state we have to distinguish two kinds of states. There are states that are strong institutionally, that’s one issue but there’s a second issue and that is the scope of state authority. There is a famous development writer called Francis Fukiyama and he has a recent book called State Building and the thrust of the book is that contrary to what many in the academic and policy world are saying not in the United Sates too much but mostly in Europe that the state is basic, that we’re into regional organization sovereignty has got to go his argument. 

You know, I agree with him, no we need strong state not weak states. The problem is that many of the states in Latin America and your state are weakened institution but have broad scope of authority. In other words, your president for instance, has great responsibility on paper in the constitution but very little ability to actually execute these responsibilities. And when you give an institution responsibility without the means to carry out the responsibility, you guarantee dissatisfaction. It doesn’t matter who’s the president. It is not just a question of personality. 

I hear in the Philippines a great deal about we need better leaders but wait a minute, very few countries have great leaders and when they get great leaders, it’s infrequent. And great leaders arise sometimes but not always in a time of crisis. The key is to get the proper institution that one, would run when you have mediocre leaders and two, will attract better leaders than what you’re getting. 

The US has gone 200 years and we have had very few great presidents. Mostly we have had mediocre but they look very powerful not because they’re great leaders but because they stand on top of great institutions and so a country can get along quite well with mediocre people coz they have great institutions. But what about the impact of political institutions on the rest of the country? Fukiyama’s state building book focuses on the question of economic development which of course is a great deal here in the Philippines. 

I’m talking to other professors, I have learned that from being first in Asia economically some 40 years ago you’re now last in Asia. While there’s some obvious things wrong in your constitution but there are many more things that may not be so obvious and I’m saying this not be critical. I’m saying, hopefully to offer some kind of suggestions about how you should think about it. I don’t have a solution for you because even if I did have a solution it should be your solution. The constitution comes from people. They don’t come from outsiders. You can look for the outside to learn and indeed the US looked to the outside to learn. But ultimately a constitution has to be the way of the people. That’s what a constitution is, its way. 

And so each constitution has to fit for particular people. On the other hand, there are certain things that we can learn about constitution that will tell you that if you choose A, B will follow and if you choose A and you want to get C, don’t choose A. There are consequences that follow and unfortunately both in political science and in law, very few people pay attention to what I would call “nuts and balls” of a constitution. The title in this, of today’s talk is separation of powers and constitution-making.

Until the US Constitution, constitutions were not made. Constitutions develop in a kind of accidental way or in a forced way in they were, constitutions were the way of a particular people and they might vary among various areas within an ethnic group. So if we go back to the ancients, Aristotle classified the constitution in three ways then doubled it in terms of a good point and a good point, and I think at some point you get some kind of overview in terms of political thought. Aristotle is very important to understand political thought in the west. 

You in the Philippines are part Western and part Eastern and you have to understand both worlds. And they could be good as a bridge, it can be good as a source of dynamism and also a source of confusion if you don’t understand the different roots from which you are going in any event, you have to begin with the proposition that much of what we’re talking about is Western. It had not penetrated the Eastern mind, which is not to say that ours is superior in the West and the Eastern mind is inferior, not at all. They’re different. Western philosophy has not penetrated China. Unfortunately, American businessmen don’t understand that their business operations and their assumptions based on Western philosophy. 

The whole idea of the rule of law is Western, it’s not Eastern. It’s product of the ancient Greece passed on by Rome to the medieval period and carried through England to the United States. If you don’t understand that, then you can’t create a constitution if that’s what you want to do. So when we talk about institutions and constitution-making, we move from a period in which constitutions reflected the Aristotelian principle ultimately of the mixed government as I said there were the three forms of government –monarchy, aristocracy, and mixed government or mixed polity was a form of democracy. These were the good points. Bad points were tyranny, oligarchy and democracy. 

When the US Constitution came along, democracy was considered the worst possible form of government because every democracy had failed. It failed because many stole the property of the few. And so there has always been this class conflict what Aristotle understood was that if you’re going to build a stable society you need a strong middle class. That is somehow you have to figure out how to spread the wealth without stealing the wealth. 

So in the medieval period, the ideal form of government was the idea of mixed government. So England in the 18th century was considered by many in Europe the ideal government. It was the Aristotelian medieval form of mixed polity, the one with the monarch. The feud was the house of lords and the many was the house of commons. It mixed the classes not together but it mixed them in the government and it allocated the resources. 

Here’s the problem for democracy and the US had to face it. When you give people their liberty, what do they do with it? Abuse it. Today people think, you give democracy to a country and everything will be good. It doesn’t work that way. Those who created the US Constitution said, when you give people their liberty they will abuse them. Now that is why for years people in Europe resisted the idea of giving them many of their liberty because they fear they will abuse it and take their property and power. 

I suggest to you that that opinion is shared by many of our oligarchs. There’s a fear of what democracy will do and all you have to do is look at your senate to see that fear justified. You have as we do in our country, unfortunately, you have showman. That is not what a democratic system stabilize needs to do. So what do they do? The problem when you give people their liberty is that they will abuse it. 

By the way, most of what I’m talking about can be found in a good study of what you called “The Federalist Papers” and everybody in political science and law should read it. This is not just an American doctrine, it is one of the greatest tracks of political theory of all time. The people who wrote the federal papers were the ones who drafted the US Constitution and they made a government that last. And they understood, it was no easy feat. So when it comes to constitution-making, understand that it is a difficult, complex exercise and if you don’t do it properly, it will run a mock. 

This morning’s paper I read an article saying that those who are advocating charter change are saying that members of the senate ought to listen to the clamor of the people in the rural areas. Well my first reaction is, if people are clamoring for something, you better slow it down because no good decisions are made in a context of clamoring. Good decisions are made with reflection. It has to be reasoned analysis. I don’t mean academic reasoned analysis, I mean negotiated reasoned analysis where the different interest of society get together in part to protect their own interest yes, but also what the greater good in mind. 

And unless you get that kind of set-up it’s very difficult to create a constitution in a good sense. Now if we in the United States today, were to attempt to create a constitution, we would be in chaos. We have such deep political divisions in the US that we could not be able to agree on anything. The only thing that keeps us together politically is the strength of our political institutions that keep the whole thing from blowing apart. 

Just the idea of a constitutional convention in the US was proposed about a year ago sends shivers to the people. Why? In the US, we had the fortune, good fortune, providential fortune, whatever, of having a brilliant group of men in a time where they could meet in secret and deliberate. You cannot meet in secret anymore as a result of transparency and democratic notion. So what did you get instead? You have gotten an attempt in congress to create what you call amendments. But you have to distinguish two things. If you have a fundamental constitution and you’re going to think your way to something that’s an amendment. 

If you’re gonna open the whole thing, that’s not an amendment, that is making a new constitution. What is being proposed right now in Charter Change is a new constitution. It is not an amendment. Do you need a new constitution? Absolutely. Do you need it now? You need to have a reflection. You got a very bad constitution in terms of producing what you would like to have, peace and prosperity. Let’s go back to the idea that in democracy, what you get is the abuse of liberty. If you don’t understand how that can be solved, there will be the tendency to go for the authoritarian government. 

In the last week, I’ve heard the rumors about the coup and threats quite frequent in many parts of the world certainly in Latin America. If the people get upset with their system, with their constitution and they’re saying it’s not working, they want order, and to get order they turn too often or accede to the military. Well people will always prefer order from chaos because you can’t carry on life when you’re faced with anarchy. But you have to resort either through people power or the military coup. It means your institutions are in bad shape. 

Now the US institution were in very bad shape and yet we changed it overnight. So it is possible but it is difficult. And in doing it, you have to keep in mind what kind of country you want. Now I tell people that when I talk about the US Constitution I’m not saying that you should favor our constitution. Indeed if you wanted to, you could. We created deliberately, the large commercial public and there was a reason for it. The reason is historical. It’s peculiar to the United States. It doesn’t apply in the Philippines. 

We have Anglo-American position. In the 18th century we focused on the ancient republic of Greece and Rome. How many people in the Philippines are talking about the ancient republics of ancient Rome and Greece? Nobody! In the 18th century of the United States everybody who was educated looked to those places as model of government. Why? They were reacting against monarchy and they wanted a republic as opposed to a monarchy. A republic means the public thing whereas monarchs in the medieval period, they own the country. So the public has the notion that the country was owned by the public, not the monarchs. That’s the essence of republicans. But within the republicanism, there are whole range of possibilities. 

In the US there was a debate, should we be agrarian republic or should we be a commercial republic? Now that debate actually continues today both in the United States but more importantly to you in the world afar where it does not happen. If you look at the fight over globalization, what you will see is that it is a fight between those who want a commercial world and those who want to maintain an agrarian access towards their own country. 

And this is difficult to do in the Philippines. You’ve been basically agrarians except for Manila and few other places and agrarianism produces a certain type of people. I’m not saying that it is this type or that type but there is a common character for the people.

They said if people abuse their liberty what are we going to do about it? How can we make a stable government? Well they said there are basically two ways to deal with it. You can either change people or you can control the effects & bad effects of liberty and they decreed they wouldn’t change people as the government. 

You remember the soviet union who’s gonna change people, who’s gonna make the new soviet man and what they created were soviet golems, those who wouldn’t perform. The point is, it is not up to the government to change people, it is up to churches, religious groups, individuals to change people. Governments are there to deal with something more limited. Well the other way to deal with it and this is important. I think to the This is because it is different from what we did. There are a number of governments around the world which reflect more or less homogeneous people and if what you want is to maintain a homogeneity then you gonna do one. 

China government or at least you gonna differentiate it from other kinds of government. What do I mean? Germany is more or less homogeneous of course when they took it to the extreme, in the 1930’s to 40’s they attribute the ideology of Aryanism as the superior race and we know where that lead Japan was also used to live as a homogeneous country. Both today have parliamentary governments. Those government’s maybe appropriate in 2 kinds of homogeneous people. But you have to understand that there are various types of parliamentary governments. And depending on how one builds it, you will get different results. 

The next one I wanna make is a take off on that. Labels are not sufficient. You have to look in detail at specific provision and given a rather long instruction, I wanna make a couple of points here so you’ll know where I’m going. The first point is that the separation of powers has been a large constitutional structure and in last part which I believe to be applicable to any government in the world. 

The second half which are all… in federalism which is not applicable to every government in the world. There are diff. separation of powers and there are diff. forms of federalism and I’ll get back on that now. My second point I’m gonna go over to some provisions in your constitutions and tell you why they can’t work. And then finally I wanna come back with a more detailed discussion about separation of power. 

Okay. I described to you the power of liberty and a problem of liberty them come to a solution. If it is not that, you’re going change to human nature, what are you gonna do? What you have to do is to use government components fast. Therefore government has to be structured in such a way that to limit the possibilities of abuses. 

Now in the US the key to doing this was two-fold. One was societal along w/ governmental. In the societal part does not appear in the constitution. It appears in the discussion of federal papers…. But without understanding this doctrine, you won’t understand the rest of the US system. They decided to use wealth not for the sake of wealth. They decided to create wealth for the sake of peace and strength. It is different. 

In Europe, they created the European Union unfortunately without much design. The driving principle has been the notion that if we create in Europe a larger and bigger than the united states, we will be able to be a counter-weight to the united states. Well, that’s one thing as a large group but they mend faster and created a political union and they’re having difficulty, for this political union, in the election last spring when France and Netherlands defeated the constitutional creed. 

And why did they defeat the constitutional creed? We can interweave different reasons why they did so. But essentially they were not prepared politically through what will be the implication of what had come before. They did, they want a great or economic wealth but they really didn’t want the consequence because economic development and political development are tied together one way or another. 

In the US we tied it together in a way that nobody had ever done before and that is the effort… if you don’t want to change human nature what you have to do is to control the effect of their pursued self-interest. And how do you that? Well, you avoid what appears in many countries. In many countries, you have a ruling group, whether it’s small or big group. And they are what we call faction. And so it’s their group and everybody else. And the ruling group will not know those who want to make rule. It’s a majority group maybe and a minority group or maybe it’s a minority group calling the majority group. Either situation is bad because you have a class conflict. 

In effect the society will not develop economically because of your unwillingness to share resources. So what we said in our country, well, the factions is the problem, then we have to make factions the solution. In.. you know what to get a virus, the way to stop the virus is by using a little bit of the virus as a vaccine. The virus counter-acts the virus, that’s what they aid. The reviewed statutes to counter-act statutes. It is also a kind of divide and confuses strategy. When there are only two factions, they’re gonna be like this. When there are many factions and none of them are strong enough, they to ally with one another. 

The within in the US, has always been is to create as many minorities as possible, not ethnic and religious minorities, not to create them but to allow them to exist. You welcome them and then you would break them up not on racial, religious ethnic grounds. You would break them up on commercial grounds so that you have more and more commercial interests so you get people out of politics into work and in work, they not only produce wealth they produce political peace because they try to run a business and make money.

It’s hard to argue with the other person if you wanna sell him something and they don’t agree with it. In other words, they make the site to a kind of commercial common ground. So that’s the theory, you create a lot of factions, you create a lot of wealth. From that you get the taxes and the taxes will drive the institution. But it’s enough to just have any kind of constitution. As these groups exist and get more powerful unless the institution control it, a series of groups will get together and they’ll band to create an oligarchy and we have some of that in the Philippines. 

So what do you do? First of all you have to embrace what our founders did, principle of suffrage and power, anybody know where that principle come from? Never heard of the French man Montesquieu? We didn’t follow the French system but we did follow the French man Montesquieu. Unfortunately the French didn’t follow him, if they had, they have heard of the principle. They have something they call they teach in France, and they tell me, they have a separation of power too. And I say what type of system you have, parliamentary system, I understand the separation of power, is not a separation of power system. 

Montesquieu has one understanding of separation of power because he based on the British model. The British model is not a separation of power system. It was actually the mixed government system that I mentioned. The French has a separation of power system but it’s not the US separation power system. You have a separation of power system and you may think it’s an American style, presidential system, its not. That’s a myth. 

People are saying we wanna get rid of the American style, presidential system. Ok. You do anything you want but don’t think you have an American presidential system. First of all we don’t have a presidential system. We have a president and it’s not making a presidential system. We have fundamentally a separation of power system. Why do most people in the world believe we have a presidential system? Because the first you see on TV is the president. 

The US president looks very strong outside US if you get inside he looks very weak. The congress is the strength… you don’t know any US congressmen? I thought maybe you would have read some of the Philippine Constitution that you get but let me just through some of the things… It is natural for people in your own country to have a misimpression of what their government would do. Most Americans have no idea how US government works. 

Most Americans believe that the Bill of Rights is all we have and that’s the most important thing and they’re absolutely wrong about that. The Bill of Rights is the icing on the cake. The Bill of Rights would be nothing without separation of power. I used to believe when before I went to Washington that the president is the strongest and he’s not… and I learned that. The problem is the last 30 years in the US, we’ve done a number of things to weaken the US presidency and we’ve violated separation of power in a number of ways and some of our provisions both domestically and international are due to changes in US practice. 

Let me come back to the Philippines which is my second point. I daresay that your president is very powerful. Well, I would say yes and no. Have I talked about powerful institutions in broad scope. Institutionally, the president… scope wise your president has too much authority to possible be able to render it. For instance in your constitution the president has general powers of supervision over all the government. US president has no such power. For a sense, your president is very powerful in theory. 

Now this is, let me just give you a good reason… you saw some of Hurricane Katrina to hit my state and unfortunately it did not affect that mush of Baton Rouge but it destroyed New Orleans. And people in Europe are sickly would not understand how President Bush would not take care of things in his own when he can send troops all over the world. Even the Americans couldn’t understand this. There are federal slips. President Bush met on Air Force One the governor of Louisiana, a very nice, honest, but incompetent. 

I have nothing against Daisy. Not because she’s a woman but probably I must say, I know how many females are around here and one of the things that always struck is that how powerful Filipino women are. This woman however… we used to have corruption so we went from corruption to honesty, but we got to get to competence. What people cannot believe that the president of the US had asked the governor of Louisiana permission to land the troops in. And her answer was, “Give me 24 hours to think.” 

A number of people died in that twenty-four hours, and when she came back after twenty four hours she said, “No.” She had under the constitution every constitutional right to do it. Why? She had to be politically accountable for her stupidity. Point is, we have to be clear of who has the responsibility. Do they have the means to carry out their responsibility? And if they fail on it, then you need to punish the politically, and if you don’t do that it will not work effective because the principle of separation of power is that each of the branches have to be strong and is therefore checking and competing with the other two branches even while not being able to invade the other branches. 

So what do you have in the Philippines? Your senate. Your senators are elected at large. Every senator in the Philippines, just like in the US, believes that he or she could do a better job as president than the current president. It doesn’t matter who the president is. They all believe that but there’s a fundamental difference between being in a legislature and being in an executive. The legislature debates the policy but once the policy is settled, the executive has to implement it. In a legislature, you want many votes. You can’t deliberations you want carefulness. You want slowness. In executive, you want just the opposite of that. You want oneness. You want quickness, and therefore they are at odds. But every legislature would want to tell the president what to do. It is the nature of the beast. The beast is not only democracy, the beast is human nature. 

So you can neither create a system that takes into account the good parts and bad parts of human nature and design it like you were tailoring a set of clothes to fit, that human nature is this particular cultural historical context. Make it fit well, not big and baggy, not to tight. Then depress so in your system you give all of this authority to the president but not to be and then you give competition to the senate. A president in a democracy is going to be weaker from the legislation. 

Therefore the president if you have the separation of power system had to spread. Now I understand that after the Marcos, because he had a dictator the tendency is to weakening effect. They did this in Europe, you have to understand it’s not the problem of power per se, it’s how you structure and strengthen power. But weakness of power more dangerous in some cases. So the US, after we got rid a king, people wanted to have a weak president fortunately those who drafted our constitution said no, we need a strong president. But wait a minute, if you’re gonna have a strong president he would be… ah, separation of powers, they have to look at the other two branches. 

The Supreme Court from what I can tell, your system is in better shape than we like our consensus such that a vis-à-vis foreigner will have a better reputation. I’m not aware of charges of corruption regarding your courts here but it’s endemic in Latin America your court is too much of power. Your constitution has folded powers in ways unbelievable. I read in a daily this morning, that the senate is authorized in censor of oil to argue before the Supreme Court on the issue of the directive of the president. 

There’s your big political issues and your separation of powers, they have to be called out between the two branches and it is the court to argue with congress you’re gonna get tyranny because you wont have separation of power. You have the joinder of two of them. The principle of separation of power is next that when you get two or more branches joined together you lose liberties one way or another.

At some point somebody needs to read your constitution. Point by point, what’s wrong and what’s not. First of all, I can tell you this is not the constitution as I understand the constitution. This is a statute and that’s why you can easily amend it. That’s the problem… a constitution is supposed to be fundamental, it doesn’t change. Now we have the same problem, we change over the course of about 12 yrs. And your experience with constitutionalism really started with 1987 before that 1935 so you are still in the experimental phase and you have to go through that. But when you create the next constitution, if it’s not right, you’re gonna guarantee instability. When you guarantee instability you gonna have a number of people power or you gonna have a coup. 

If this next one doesn’t work, if the charter change goes forward as it is going forward now, what’s the commonal problem? It is it’s the congress doing, the congress is doing it. I don’t care what country you’re in, what congress, what party, if you give the congress power to change the constitution, don’t be surprised if what they do is to give themselves more power. The only way to guarantee against it is to have a body that only exist to create a constitution and then so that it can’t empower itself. not because they’re great human beings but because they do not want to give up their powers. As simple as that. 

If we look at the last 2 presidents, Bush and Clinton, they both had both majorities in both houses of congress coz when we created out congress we set out to weaken it. And weakened it by having two houses. You’re talking about a unicameral government. Yours would be the only one in the world. You have to understand that a unicameral government centralizes and collapses power. Things go through to processes. A parliamentary system works faster than a separation of polity. 

If you take a parliamentary system and you make a single house –boom! Everything goes too fast. It means that controlling factions will have their way very quickly and there will be no effective opposition. We know effective opposition. If there is no effective opposition, there will be no representation generally of the people for their economic interest. Whoever controls the unicameral house will run the country. There’s talk that you will work towards federalism. It will never happen. 

The congress will never give up its power to the states. It won’t happen. It’s naïve. We’re talking here not about platitudes. We’re talking about laws power. That’s what you have to understand. I don’t like Hobbs as a political theorist but he understood power. Ideology of politics is about power –personal power, political power and economic power. And if you want o win power for the middle class for this country, we have to align political power in such a way that it meets economic resources of this country which are great; can be fully realized and spread among its people. 

So the presidency has judicially fully thought of, you have to consider whether you want a unicameral house, and you need to pull back on your courts. Within that context if you understand, those are the basic in supporting then you can air out consistent and with a well design system that can lead your people. There is no reason why you can’t then fill the infrastructure.

The one thing in charter change, there are many things in the constitution that inhibits foreign investments. Those days are over. You will send yourself more and more poverty unless you could remove that. The reason why the Philippines is taller, you know I’ve seen this for years. You distinctly followed the Latin American model of protection. It had not done any good. The only thing that’s saving you is your high population. If you didn’t have a good reproduction… Look at Europe. 

They’re not replacing the population. What they’re getting? They’re Moslems. And now they’re giving conflict. Your population is part of your strength. Don’t be misled it is not. You can afford to lose a million people a year and they send back their remittances and that works in a short term but if it’s long term economic development that is a good way to develop your economy. 

You got to bring in the investments and you can take for instance the country like Ireland. Ireland in some ways is like the Philippines. They got the infusion of investments and then not only the Irish came back but people from all over the world. You got polish towns in Ireland. They speak polish, they eat polish fruits not Irish. It’s Poland in the middle of Ireland. We’re used to that in the United States but the Irish were not used to that and this is why I come back to the last point. 

Ultimately, you have to be aware of whatever choices you make even with a good constitution are going to have social consequences and you have to be aware of this and think about them. As dean of the Kennedy Law School, in Dublin, we used to think if only we have a little more money, all of our problems will be solved. They got more money and they got big problems that they never thought about. 

The problem was that the constitution was designed for an agrarian, homogeneous in terms of ethnic and religious backgrounds. If you create a constitution, if you have to take into account so much religious differences in the Philippines… I know ethnics are very predominant groups but you have the world problems. It has to be addressed. You can’t mold them and when you deal with federalism, if you take the great danger of federalism is that most federal states break apart. 

And if you have Mindanao breaking apart in its own going off to some other kind of Islamic state. So I end on this note and hopefully you’ll engage in questions. My point is simply an educational point –we in the United States have worked with Europe to look at their experience and their political thought and they brought it in but we adapted it in our own experience and our circumstances. I suggest that you find all these answers in the Philippines. 

You have not had the constitutional provisions. In looking abroad however I’m not saying that copy anyone’s constitutions, you should not. You should take it and fit it to yourself. It is a great task. It is a difficult task but you’re in a situation like the United States 200 years ago. Whatever you do, even if it’s nothing will have consequences and if you were to bring about the kind of peace and prosperity that is possible for Filipinos, political scientists and lawyers need to pay attention to it. 

And as I like to say in the US, I wish that every lawyers had studied political science and I wish that every political scientists had studied some law. Thank you very much.