What the Supreme Court says

about love
'The heart has reasons of its own which reason does not
know,' says one ruling

ON LOVE. Supreme Court decisions teach lessons on love and

justice.

MANILA, Philippines – In America 50 years ago, you could

not love someone whose skin color was different from
yours. But love fights.

Some of the cases brought to the Supreme Court have

been a testament to that – love strives, if not to triumph,
then at least to be just.

In 1992, the Supreme Court awarded damages to a young

woman's parents who sued the parents of their daughter’s
boyfriend for civil damages. The young couple died in
"what appears from all indications was a crime
committed by their minor son."

In that decision, Justice Florenz Regalado said:

“One of the ironic verities of life, it has been said, is that

sorrow is sometimes a touchstone of love.”
There are the real deaths, then there are the presumptive
deaths. In Philippine civil code, if a spouse disappears
"and there is danger of death," then the other party can
presume him or her to be dead and can remarry.

In 1998, Jerry Cantor left wife Maria Fe in their home and

never returned. Even after 4 years, the Supreme Court did
not allow for Jerry to be presumed dead, therefore
prohibiting Maria Fe from moving on.

Justice Marvic Leonen said in his dissent:

“She bore the indignity of being left behind. She suffered

the indifference of her husband. Such indifference was
not momentary. She anguished through years of never
hearing from him. The absence of a few days between
spouses may be tolerable, required by necessity. The
absence of months may test one’s patience. But the
absence of years of someone who made the solemn
promise to stand by his partner in sickness and in health,
for richer or poorer, is intolerable. The waiting is as
painful to the spirit as the endless search for a person
that probably did not want to be found or could no longer
be found.”

Justice Leonen also dissented when the Supreme Court

ruled that despite decades of separation, it is the wife
who has the right to bury her husband, and not the
common-law partner that he has been with until his death.

“The law reaches into much of our lives while we live. It

constitutes and frames most of our actions. But at the
same time, the law also grants us the autonomy or the
space to define who we are. Upon our death, the law does
not cease to respect our earned autonomy. Rather, it
gives space for us to speak through the agency of she
who may have sat at our bedside as we suffered through
a lingering illness.

I am of the view that it is that love and caring which

should be rewarded with the honor of putting us in that
place where we mark our physical presence for the last
time and where we will be eternally remembered.”
There is also injustice in sex, as the Supreme Court
declared in Tsoi vs Court of Appeals. The High Court
declared null and void a marriage based on the complaint
of the wife that they were not having sex.

Justice Justo Torres Jr said:

“Love is useless unless it is shared with another. Indeed,

no man is an island, the cruelest act of a partner in
marriage is to say "I could not have cared less." This is so
because an ungiven self is an unfulfilled self. The egoist
has nothing but himself. In the natural order, it is sexual
intimacy which brings spouses wholeness and oneness.
Sexual intimacy is a gift and a participation in the
mystery of creation. It is a function which enlivens the
hope of procreation and ensures the continuation of
family relations.”

Love, we learn, needs to fulfill obligations. In Antonio vs

Reyes, the Supreme Court acknowledged that the wife
was still in love with her husband. Nevertheless, they still
voided the marriage after finding that the wife was
"psychologically incapacitated to comply with the
essential obligations of marriage."

Justice Dante Tinga said:

“Marriage, in legal contemplation, is more than the

legitimatization of a desire of people in love to live
together.”

Love is also something you decide to work hard for, said

Dr Nedy Lorenzo Tayag in his expert testimony as a
clinical psychologist in the annulment case of Rumbaua
vs Rumbaua.

“Individuals who are in love had the power to let love

grow or let love die – it is a choice one had to face when
love is not the love he/she expected.”

Chief Justice Hilario Davide has an advice for those who

find themselves in the legal and moral dilemma of falling
in love outside marriage:

“If he really loved her, then the noblest thing he could

have done was to walk away.”
In that case, Davide and the Supreme Court disbarred the
lawyer for committing bigamy.

Is a love that is lawful a just love? Ask the woman

in Figueroa vs Barrancowho tried to bar her ex-boyfriend
from taking his lawyer’s oath after he left her and their
child, and married another woman. She did not prevail.

Justice Flerida Ruth Romero said:

“We cannot castigate a man for seeking out the partner of

his dreams, for marriage is a sacred and perpetual bond
which should be entered into because of love, not for any
other reason.”

If a woman left her husband and their children, is that a

ground for annulment? Not in Matudan vs People as the
Supreme Court remained very conservative in its
definition of what constitutes annulment.

Justice Leonen pleaded the court to be more open minded

in his dissent:

“Parties should not be forced to stay in unhappy or

otherwise broken marriages in the guise of protecting the
family. This avoids the reality that people fall out of love.
There is always the possibility that human love is not
forever.”

To borrow from American jurisprudence, the US Supreme

Court in 1967 invalidated all laws that prohibited
interracial marriages. They said in Loving vs Virginia:

The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of

the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of
happiness by free men.

In Obergefell vs Hodges that legalized same-sex marriage

in all US states, their Supreme Court said:

“Marriage embodies a love that may endure even past

death. It would misunderstand these men and women to
say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is
that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek
to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to
be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of
civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity
in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that
right.”

That landmark ruling proves that love can win, despite

odds.

Justice Florenz Regalado left us with this poignant lesson

in love when he awarded back wages to a 30-year-old
teacher who was fired for marrying her 16-year-old
student.

“If the two eventually fell in love, despite the disparity in

their ages and academic levels, this only lends substance
to the truism that the heart has reasons of its own which
reason does not know.”