Supreme Court Service
After nine years with the Court of Appeals, Reyes was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1954 by President Ramon Magsaysay. At 52, he was among the youngest justices appointed to the Court. However, Reyes would never get to serve as Chief Justice. This was in part because his close friend Roberto Concepcion, several months his junior, was appointed to the Court a few months before Reyes. Concepcion was named Chief Justice in 1966.
During his tenure on the Court, Reyes and Claro M. Recto were unsuccessfully nominated to the International Court of Justice.
In his 18 years on the Court, Reyes grew in prominence unlike few other Supreme Court magistrates before and since. His gruff voice and inscrutable stare, which had terrorized his students years before, similarly intimidated lawyers who argued in hearings before the Court. Often, especially on matters relating to his specialty, civil law, his opinions proved to be the final word. In some quarters, he was called "the Court", in tribute to the considerable influence he wielded over his colleagues. Upon his retirement in 1972, one of his colleagues, the future Chief Justice Felix Makasiar, said of Reyes that "o jurist within living memory has commanded during the last quarter of a century, the deep respect and admiration of the bench and bar, of dilettantes and scholars, of professors and students."
Read more about this topic: J. B. L. Reyes
Famous quotes containing the words supreme, court and/or service:
“For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“We went on, feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the soldier, binding up his wounds, harboring the stranger, visiting the sick, ministering to the prisoner, and burying the dead, until that blessed day at Appomattox Court House relieved the strain.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)
“Finally, your lengthy service ended,
Lay your weariness beneath my laurel tree.”
—Horace [Quintus Horatius Flaccus] (65–8)