| Dean's Corner
JUSTICE VENICIO T. ESCOLIN
31 March 2008
I pay homage to a remarkable Filipino, retired Justice Venicio T. Escolin, who died from diabetes complications last Saturday, at the ripe age of 87.
Justice Escolin took his first two years of law studies at the Ateneo, but the outbreak of the Second World War compelled him to finish his law degree in another law school; but he remained a true-Atenean at heart, and devoted his professional life teaching in the Ateneo.
He loved Remedial Law, was an acknowledged expert in all its varied and complicated aspects; yet he conveyed its intricacies in the most basic and simple manner that it could be understood and appreciated as people’s law.
He loved teaching the Law, and in spite of his heavy load in the Judiciary, continued diligently and conscientiously teaching the courses he carried, never being absent for a class, submitting his grades always on time, participating in activities that sought to teach the Law better, etc. He taught with a passion and high-sense of responsibility that would put many young professors to shame.
Most of all, he loved his law students; each one of them all through the years that he taught at the Ateneo. Each of us his former students always felt that he treated each one with a sense of importance; that he honored each one with a sense of devotion and dedication; and each of us felt an obligation to study even better for his course, for each of us felt in our very bones that the good Justice wanted to be proud of each one of us. It was one of the great tragedies in Law School to go through the program without having Justice Escolin as a professor.
There was little doubt that Justice Escolin was one of the most effective professors in the Law School. Since he had access to the scores of his former students in Remedial Law exams in the Bar Examinations, he was able to monitor over the years the effectiveness of his teaching method. Over the long years of his teaching vocation, the grades of his students in Remedial Law Review became the barometer of their training in that it would also be the grades the grades they will achieve for the subject in the Bar Examinations!
An extraordinary Atenean has thus passed-away. A great Filipino has departed the national scene, leaving behind mean men and women of the Law who look at their profession with a great sense of passion and dedication. A good man has left us; and in the end that is the one true measure of a life well-lived. | 
