Clampdown: UP goes after land grabbers

The Supreme Court made it plain enough when—for the nth time in September 2004—it upheld with finality the ownership of the University of the Philippines over its campus in Diliman, Quezon City. “We strongly admonish courts and unscrupulous lawyers to stop entertaining spurious cases seeking further to assail UP’s title,” it warned.

“These cases open the dissolute avenues of graft to unscrupulous land-grabbers who prey like vultures upon the campus of UP. By such actions, they wittingly or unwittingly aid the hucksters who want to earn a quick buck by misleading the gullible to buy the Philippine counterpart of the proverbial London Bridge.”

If there is a hint of exasperation in the way the decision was worded, it must be because the Court is tired of repeating itself over the same issue for almost fifty years now. It first declared that UP is the rightful owner of the Diliman campus on October 31, 1959. Since then, it has decided eight more similar cases with the same verdict.

Even the Land Registration Authority (LRA) has set the record straight. In a report issued by its Verification Committee in August 1984, the LRA traced the origin of UP’s Transfer Certificate Title (TCT) No. 9462 which covers the University’s Diliman campus to the TCT No. 36048 of the Commonwealth of the Philippines. Apparently, the Philippine Government executed a deed of sale in favor of UP on March 1, 1949 relative to TCT No. 36048. Thus, TCT No. 36048 was cancelled in lieu of TCT No. 9462 issued in the name of UP.

Going by these judicial declarations, UP should not have a problem with chasing away illegal settlers.
Yet this is not the case. In the past decades, UP has been busy keeping land grabbers at bay. It’s almost funny how all these claimants come out of the woodwork, their bogus papers matched only by their absurd claims.

But this is exactly what alarms UP. Where are these fake documents coming from? How do the claimants get hold of them? Armed with fake titles, they are able to get their day in court no matter if their claims run from the incredulous to the hilarious. Some of these claimants even manage to elevate their arguments to the Court of Appeals, and quite a few to the Supreme Court itself.
Is there an invisible hand that orchestrates these relentless and seemingly organized land-grabbing attacks against the UP property?

Unholy crusade
Only this October, for example, UP won a favorable decision from the Quezon City Regional Trial Court against St. Mary’s Crusade to Alleviate Poverty of Brethren Foundation Inc., which seeks the reconstitution of a parcel of land in Quezon City with an area of 4,304,623 square meters. The claim apparently encompasses the 493-hectare Diliman property.

St. Mary’s Crusade claims that the land area in question is covered by Original Certificate Title (OCT) No. 1609 which is owned by one Marcelino Tiburcio. On November 26, 1985, Tiburcio supposedly executed a Deed of Transfer and Conveyance of OCT No. 1609 in favor of St. Mary Village Association, Inc. It is based on this alleged Deed of Transfer and Conveyance that St. Mary’s Crusade is now laying claim over the property.

Interestingly, in 1989, an entity named St. Mary Village Association, Inc. filed a petition seeking the annulment of UP’s titles to its Diliman property based on an alleged Spanish grant issued on March 25, 1877 in favor of one Eladio Tiburcio. The trial court dismissed the petition on January 31, 1990.
The people behind St. Mary’s Crusade admit that they do not have the original certificate but they do have a technical description of the property in question, duly certified as correct by the National Archives of the Philippines and a certification issued by the Land Management Bureau of Manila. How did they get past these government agencies? But what the Office of the Vice President for Legal Affairs finds most curious is that these claimants refuse to identify in their petition all the persons that they claim would benefit from the property. Who exactly are these people?

A check on the background of the people behind St. Mary’s Crusade reveals that they are all residents of the Diliman campus, presently living in the housing area allotted by UP for its qualified personnel under its housing program. All but one of the petitioners had been former UP employees who had availed of and qualified for housing privileges. These employees subsequently resigned or retired from active service but refused to leave their respective housing units. They are, in short, illegal tenants, and therefore subject to eviction.

Monomania of lands
And then there’s the perplexing case of Prince Julian Morden Tallano. Here is a man who claims to be a descendant of King Luisong Tagean whose sons supposedly included Rajah Soliman and Lapu-Lapu. (This alleged filial relationship between Soliman and Lapu-Lapu—two prominent figures in the country’s history—has apparently escaped the attention of historians for it is not mentioned in textbooks.) And by virtue of his lineage, Tallano is now asserting ownership over several land titles. OCT No. T-01-4, for example, covers the whole archipelago and its four regions: Luzon, Visayas, Palawan-Zamboanga embracing Kalayaan and Sabah, and Mindanao. TCT No. T-408, on the other hand, covers 1.253 billion square meters of Metro Manila.

What is even more baffling is that despite the patent absurdities of such claims, the Court of First Instance (CFI) of Pasay City allegedly promulgated on November 4, 1975 an Order for Reconstitution of TCT No. T-408 and OCT No. T-01-4 , among other titles, in favor of Gregorio Madrigal Acopiado, Tallano’s supposed great great grandfather. As in the case of St. Mary’s Crusade, the original copy of the said decision was reportedly lost or, more specifically, destroyed in a fire that gutted the Pasay City Hall on January 18, 1992. Tallano’s group, however, claims they have a true copy of the decision certified by the Office of the Solicitor General.

In 2005, Tallano and a certain Anacleto Madrigal Acopiado filed with the Regional Trial Court Branch 220 of Quezon City a petition for the enforcement of the CFI-Pasay City’s 1975 decision. Acopiado insisted that by virtue of said judgment, UP’s TCT over its Diliman campus is null and void. Thus, UP should reconvey ownership over its Diliman property to the Acopiados.

Convinced that the alleged CFI judgment was secured through fraud, the UP System Office of Legal Affairs sought the assistance of the Office of the Solicitor General and the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) to determine the true identity of the claimants. In a report dated June 10, 2005, the NBI declared that Julian Morden Tallano is not a prince but an impostor who, many times in the past, had assumed different identities and provided different addresses with the evident aim of defrauding other people. Tallano, who turned out to be a native of Nueva Ecija, was also found to be the subject of several warrants of arrest for estafa, falsification of documents, and swindling, among many others.

The identity of Anacleto Madrigal Acopiado, meanwhile, could only be established by an altered death certificate issued by the Local Civil Registrar of Taguig, Manila on November 28, 1994. Moreover, the NBI could not find any document to prove that Don Gregorio Madrigal Acopiado exists or ever existed.

Cracking the whip
There are countless other spurious claims over the ownership of the UP Diliman campus currently docketed in trial courts. And, as long as equally spurious documents are readily available from the black market, many more are expected to come out.

This is the reason UP is going beyond asserting its ownership over its property. UP is now determined to go after these organized land-grabbing factions who are growing ever more brazen.

From classroom to courtroom: OLA bridges gap between theory and practice of law

It has been five years since the UP College of Law topped the bar examination. For a law school that has consistently produced topnotchers since the bar exam was first held in 1901, five years is a long time. UP remains unparalleled as the premier law school with the most number of bar first placers at 46, followed by Ateneo de Manila University with 19 and San Beda College with 7. But why the dry spell?

An explanation may be found in the maxim neatly chiseled on the granite wall of the College of Law’s lobby: “The business of a law school is not sufficiently described when you merely say that it is to teach law, or to make lawyers. It is to teach law in the grand manner, and to make great lawyers.” This piece of advice from Oliver Wendell Holmes articulates the shift in the College’s focus, from merely generating bar topnotchers to producing students who are involved and relevant citizens.

Actual practice through public service

Indeed, at the UP College of Law, students are not only groomed to be academically excellent but also trained to become socially aware and involved through the Clinical Legal Education Program of the Office of Legal Aid (OLA). OLA’s twin objectives are to provide students with exposure to actual law practice under the guidance and supervision of faculty members, and to inculcate the concepts of public service and social involvement by providing free legal assistance to indigent litigants in the Manila area.

“OLA exposed me to the realities of legal practice with the benefit of the guidance of capable supervisors in the program,” said James S. Donato, who graduated from the College of Law this April. “It helped me contextualize the lessons I learned in the classroom in terms of the actual experiences of OLA clients.” During Donato’s internship at OLA, he experienced arguing before judges and prosecutors, drafting arguments in pleadings, coordinating with government agencies and the police, doing research in Congress, and negotiating with the opposing counsel. These were all done in tandem with advocating the needs of his clients.

Another College of Law graduate, Jobert Navallo, echoed Donato’s observations. “Through OLA, I was able to put into practice some of the things I learned in class,” said the former president of the UP Law Student Government. “I learned to synthesize all that I know from different areas and subjects of law school and integrate them so that I can better handle the case.”

Navallo also credits his OLA experience to a significant extent for passing the bar this year. “I was already familiar with the forms of pleadings and other legal documents, so it was easier for me to write one on the spot in Legal Ethics and Exercises,” he said. “Familiarization with the procedures and processes in court also helped me come up with more enlightened answers during the bar.”

Experiment in trial techniques

When OLA was established in 1974, it concerned itself solely with trial techniques. Senior law students were invited by OLA’s first director, Prof. Arturo E. Balbastro, to participate in the trial of real cases. Their participation was limited to doing research and observing the proceedings.

In 1980, Prof. Alfredo Tadiar, the second and longest serving director of OLA (from 1978 to 1996), petitioned the Supreme Court to amend Rule 138 of Rules of Court. The goal was to allow students more active participation in the trial.

Six years after the petition was filed, the Supreme Court issued Rule 138-A allowing law students to represent indigent clients in any civil, criminal, or administrative case before any trial court, tribunal, board, or officer. The rule, however, requires the law student to be done with the third year of the regular four-year prescribed law curriculum and enrolled in a law school’s clinical legal education program approved by the Supreme Court. The student will receive no compensation for services rendered.

Furthermore, the rule requires that the appearance of a law student be under the direct supervision and control of a member of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines. Also, all pleadings, motions, briefs, memoranda, or other papers to be filed with the court must be signed by the supervising lawyer for and on behalf of the legal clinic. A law student, however, may appear in inferior courts (e.g., municipal trial courts, administrative agencies) in his personal capacity and without the supervision of a lawyer, since the issues and procedures in such courts are relatively simple.

OLA is the first in the country to offer a clinical legal education program accredited by the Supreme Court. What started out as a mere experiment gradually evolved into a formal and structured part of academic coursework now officially called Law 127 and 128, or Clinical Education Program. The program is no longer by invitation and is in fact required of all students. It has practicum or internship and classroom components.

Under the practicum component of the program, interns are assigned to handle the cases of OLA’s indigent clients. Their participation runs practically the entire gamut of the legal process—from screening the applicants to attending preliminary proceedings, filing legal documents, and litigating the case in court.

On Saturdays (every Saturday during the summer and every other Saturday during the regular semester), interns attend two-hour lectures on various issues. The supervising lawyers and guest lecturers take turns discussing problems in preliminary investigation, proper conduct of direct- and cross-examination, and execution of judgments.

The OLA experience

Getting by in law school is hard enough. It becomes even harder with the demands of OLA’s Clinical Legal Education Program.

“The four units credited to OLA are definitely not commensurate to the amount of work and hours you have to put in,” said Navallo. “You already have four duty hours a week, then two hours of classroom component every two weeks, plus hearings and the time spent preparing and filing pleadings.”

He said there were even times when he would spend the whole day on OLA matters alone, skipping class to finalize a pleading due for submission in court the following day or to chase after his supervising lawyer who has to sign the pleading before it is filed. “I sometimes complain to myself about the whole thing, but at the end of the day, I realize that the cases I’m handling are more important than the theoretical discussions in class as these cases involve actual lives of people who have nowhere else to go to but OLA,” he said. “I just tell myself that I’m helping other people so all these efforts definitely won’t go to waste.”

James S. Donato

Donato, who enrolled in the OLA program while serving as vice president of the UP Law Student Government, said he balanced his time between classes and OLA by making a reasonable schedule for the day and the week and sticking to it. “And if there’s anything I couldn’t cope with, I asked for help,” he added.

Through and beyond the imponderables

Still, Navallo thinks that there is too much on the plate of OLA interns. “Some end up hating the program more than appreciating the benefits,” he pointed out. “I strongly suggest that the cases assigned to interns be limited to a manageable number.” During the regular semester, an intern can be assigned 10 to 15 cases, while during the summer, 20 to 25 cases.

Donato, meanwhile, suggested improving the equipment and facilities of OLA, which means more computers, printers, and vehicles to take interns to their hearings in far places like Caloocan, Pasay, and Antipolo. A readily available set of templates for pleadings would also help interns prepare their cases efficiently.

But despite its flaws, the OLA program has certainly gone beyond merely helping law students navigate though the legal imponderables. “As the College of Law’s outreach program, it is doing very well,” noted Donato. “I believe the program is able to help numerous indigent families every year.”