By Ricardo E. Escanlar III
Law school batches here in Iloilo, as I realized while teaching, tend to be compositionally more or less the same. Even in spite of the pandemic causing perhaps previously legally uninterested people to try their luck at becoming a lawyer, any particular year level of law students will usually be composed of fresh and relatively recent Political Science, Management, and Accounting grads in their early to mid-20s, with the occasional sprinkling of people with science and engineering backgrounds, and 30- to 40-year olds. Yet somehow, in spite of the apparent homogeneity across each and heterogeneity within each batch, each one of them manages to develop its own collective personality.
Certain batches will tend to be, or at least gain the reputation in their professors’ eyes, of being competitive, composed, hard-working, precise, or whatever relatively positive adjective is appropriate.
Which brings us, perhaps because we’re having our reunion in a few days, to my own batch in law school. What was the one word that was used to describe us?
One professor, now my co-faculty member, commented that we were “scrappy”. According to him, we were not the most prepared, or even the most gifted, but we somehow managed to provide responsive answers when called during class. That we would every once in a while fall face first, whether it be a disastrous quiz, or embarrassing recit, but we would still find ways to stand back up and continue fighting.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary provides one definition of “scrappy” as “having an aggressive and determined spirit; feisty.”
In basketball, it is usually applied to one who relies on neither technique nor talent, but on tenacity. To use a basketball analogy, we were neither Steph Curry, he of the purest shooting form, nor an athletic marvel like Russell Westbrook. We were Patrick Beverley, who made a career out of heart, hustle, and making his opponents’ life hell.
Collectively, we were neither the preternaturally talented Shaq and Kobe Los Angeles Lakers, nor the fundamentally sound San Antonio Spurs of Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili. We were more like the early 1990s New York Knicks- sure, they had a star in Patrick Ewing, but they were known for hard-nosed grinders like Charles Oakley, John Starks and the late Anthony Mason, and won through sheer grit and resoluteness.
The irony was that, when our professor made this speech, three of my classmates and I were not in class since we were cramming to beat the deadline for our moot court memorial to be submitted in Manila. Which we managed do so- by a mere ten minutes.
Yes, we were scrappy. Not the most technically sound, not the most naturally gifted, not even the hardest-working, but we somehow found ways to survive. I remember so many memories of my classmates and I finishing our drinking sessions at 5am, going home just to shower, then showing up at class at 8am on a Saturday and somehow answering the questions correctly.
Looking back, yes, maybe we could have been more refined and process-based in our approach. I personally would not recommend the way our batch as a whole approached law school to my current students. If I had my way, I would have done away with the times that we had to dust ourselves off after getting chewed out by our professors for not reading the assigned cases. Yes, we eventually acquitted ourselves by doing well in our exams, but we could have just avoided those situations had we just been more diligent in the first instance. After all, the ability to bounce back should not be viewed as more impressive than the ability to not fall in the first place.
Nonetheless, if I had a choice whether to enter law school one or two years earlier or later, and end up with a different set of batchmates, or still choose the ones I actually graduated with, I would definitely still choose the latter. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Thanks for all the law school memories, dear batchmates. Let’s continue scrapping our way through the legal profession and life in general. See you in a few days.
