Due process clause does not apply.
One of the issues repeatedly raised at the impeachment trial of Chief Justice Renato C. Corona is the issue of due process of law. Does the Due Process Clause of the Constitution apply?
Article III, section 1, of the 1987 Constitution provides: “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor shall any person be denied the equal protection of the laws.” The first part of this section is called the Due Process Clause; the second part, the Equal Protection Clause. This commentary will focus on the Due Process Clause.
The Due Process Clause of the 1987 Constitution is a reproduction of the Due Process Clause of the 1935 Constitution, which, in turn, was lifted from the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
It is a cardinal rule of statutory construction that when one jurisdiction borrows a provision of law from another jurisdiction, it borrows not only the text of the law but also the meaning attached to that text by the jurisdiction of origin. Furthermore, the borrowing jurisdiction is presumed to know the meaning of the provision as interpreted by the courts of the jurisdiction of origin.
In the United States, the consistent interpretation given over the years to the Due Process Clause has been that it applies only to private property. In 1900, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Taylor v. Beckham (No. 1), 178 US 548 (1900), speaking through Chief Justice Fuller, reviewed a long line of decisions and concluded: “The decisions are numerous to the effect that public offices are mere agencies or trusts, and not property as such. Nor are the salary and emoluments property, secured by contract, but compensation for services actually rendered. Nor does the fact that a constitution may forbid the legislature from abolishing a public office or diminishing the salary thereof during the term of the incumbent change its character or make it property. True, the restrictions limit the power of the legislature to deal with the office, but even such restrictions may be removed by constitutional amendment. In short, generally speaking, the nature of the relation of a public officer to the public is inconsistent with either a property or a contract right.”
Beckham was followed by the Philippine Supreme Court in Cornejo v. Gabriel, G.R. No. L-16887, Nov. 17, 1920. In that case, Justice Malcolm, speaking for the court, said: “Again, for this petition to come under the due process of law prohibition, it would be necessary to consider an office as ‘property.’ It is, however, well settled in the United States, that a public office is not property within the sense of the constitutional guaranties of due process of law, but is a public trust or agency. In the case of Taylor vs. Beckham ([1899], 178, U. S., 548), Mr. Chief Justice Fuller said that: ‘Decisions are numerous to the effect that public offices are mere agencies or trust, and not property as such.’ The basic idea of government in the Philippine Islands, as in the United States, is that of a popular representative government, the officers being mere agents and not rulers of the people, one where no one man or set of men has a proprietary or contractual right to an office, but where every officer accepts office pursuant to the provisions of the law and holds the office as a trust for the people whom he represents.”
The nature of the public office as a public trust is not the judgment of courts alone. The philosopher Jeremy Bentham proclaimed long ago that “[a]ll government is a trust. Every branch of government is a trust, and immemorially acknowledged to be so.” Henry Clay agreed, saying that “[g]overnment is a trust, and the officers of the government are trustees; and both the trust and the trustees are created for the benefit of the people.” Thomas Jefferson was of the same view: “When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property.”
Because the office of Justice of the Philippine Supreme Court is not property, but a public trust, and the Due Process Clause of the Constitution protects only private property, the reliance on that Clause to defeat the impeachment process is misplaced.
Atty. Marcelino C. Maxino
Faculty of Law, Silliman University
