What can 70 Law Students do for Free Speech and at what cost?

June 23, 2005

Although they will never show it to people outside their inner circle, law students are a highly oppressed group of students.  If it’s not the 200 or so pages they have to trudge through on a daily basis, it’s their professors’ unreasonable expectation that they’ve memorized it all and are ready for a serious round of cross-examination-type questions on the reading material.  It’s little wonder that perhaps a law student’s most prized asset is study time — deprive him of that and you’ll regret it.  People have learned this the hard way. Law students will deprive themselves of sleep, nourishment, TV time, and just about anything just to get their work done.  I’ve known people who’ve ended relationships because they were too “time-intensive”  or that he/she is not “strategically located” (i.e., lives/works/studies too far away) . . . from the library. 

Of course this was all lost to me when I asked about 70 of my students to help out on a small project relating to the so-called GloriaGate Tapes.  It seems to me that noone had attempted to de-construct the tapes into the individual conversations recorded.  I believe this is necessary if we’re to have a reasonably intelligent conversation about them.  So, together with another law professor (whom I’ll not name for RA 4200 purposes), we devised a plan to have law students scour through the PCIJ transcript (perhaps improve on it), separate the conversations and extract data from the tapes.  A work plan was devised that would make it easy to split the work into as many students who wanted to help out. (more…)

DTI Secretary is the New E-Commerce Czar

DigitalFilipino reports that DTI Secretary Juan Santos has announced a renewed interest in taking an active role in the e-Commerce policy space.   This raises two (2) interesting legal issues that will no doubt be settled politically. 

E.O. 269 creating the Commission on ICT seems to relegate the DTI’s role in  ICT to trade promotion (see Sec. 4[o], EO 269).  This, of course, is inconsistent with the provisions of R.A. 8792 (the ECommerce Act) which empowers the DTI to implement the law.  Also, the Implementing Rules of R.A. 8792 further vested the DTI with rulemaking powers in the area of electronic commerce (see Sec. 56, ECA IRR).

In the area of e-government, the CICT-creating E.O. also seems to vest wide powers to the agency including oversight functions for all e-government projects and the management of the e-government fund (see Secs. 4[d] & 4[e], EO 269).  However, this seems to ignore the E-Commerce Act’s IRR which requires all agencies complying with the law’s e-government provision to coordinate with the DTI (see Sec. 43[a], ECA IRR) which implies a central role for DTI in e-government projects.

So, will DTI Secretary Santos’ announcement bring these issues to the fore?  Who knows?  There seems to be turf issue that needs to be addressed.  Anyway, it’s a small pond and it’s probably easier for CICT to relinquish authority given the fact that the DTI’s mandate comes from Congress itself.  Or maybe CICT’s specialized knowledge in this space may weigh in their favor.

Let’s wait and see.