Setsumei

They say you'll never really appreciate your own country until you see it from a foreign land. To that, I add that one never gets to appreciate his legal system until he try to explain it to a foreign lawyer.

Now that we're doing some comparative law, looking at "baseline" common law and civil law rules, I'm starting to see what a strange and improbable thing Philippine law is - a civil law tradition with an active Supreme Court engaged in common law style elaboration of substantive rules. Whenever I try to explain the whole thing, they look at me as if I'm trying to describe a linear accelerator and a ham sandwich getting together and producing a fully functional airplane.