HAYDEE B. YORAC - Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation

would not find good husbands. Yorac remembered being told that it was only proper that men,
rather than women, should top the bar examinations.
After her graduation in 1962, rather than return to Saravia, Yorac decided to remain in
Manila to attend review classes for the bar examination the following year. Her diligence paid
off. She finished eighth among the ten topnotchers. Her best marks were in civil law, political
law, and even commercial law, which did not interest her because she did not find it particularly
challenging.
Yorac’s first job as a member of the bar was as a researcher in Judge Pedro Batista’s Court
of First Instance in Pasig City. She also drafted orders and decisions for the judge. Her plan was
to study the wide range of cases brought before the court before returning to U.P. to conduct
research and to teach. Although she was not lacking in lucrative offers to join established law
firms, none of them appealed to her.
Nor did the idea of working in Negros entice her. During the summer break, while still a
student, she had returned to Saravia to visit her family, but the longer she stayed in Manila and
was exposed to its cosmopolitan array of people and ideas, the more she realized how small and
traditional and feudal her hometown was. She explained, “I could hardly talk with my old friends
anymore. They were still talking about finding husbands and going to fiestas and so on. While it
was possible to talk about that for a day or two, after that you got absolutely bored! So I
preferred to be in Manila.”
Her first teaching assignment was legal research, a course for freshmen learning how to use
the law library. By the late 1960s, she was also teaching civil law and had moved to her own
place in Quezon City. Happy to have access to a library again, Yorac did research for her class as
well as for herself in jurisprudence, legal philosophy, and even international law.
Vyva Victoria M. Aguirre, a student of hers in the 1980s and who, years later, joined her in
government service, recalled Yorac’s teaching style in an article for the Philippine Law Journal:
“I first met Haydee Yorac in the classroom. She was my teacher in Persons and Family
Relations. She was also my teacher in Obligations and Contracts. I was witness to her
‘Everything you heard about me is true!’ said with matching stare and raised eyebrows.
‘Everything you heard,’ of course, referred to her reputation as a terror teacher: her sarcastic wit;
her ‘Are you sure?’ after you thought you had given a brilliant answer to her question; her
agonizing final exams; and how, at the end of the semester, you were happy to get a [passing
grade of] 3! And you wonder why you chose to enroll with her in the first place. But the greatest
wonder of it all is the fact that those who survived Haydee’s terrorism in the classroom became
her devoted friends and admirers.”
Aside from teaching, Yorac also worked as a researcher at the U.P. Law Center, the research
arm of the College of Law. This stint was short-lived, however, because she became a full-time
professor upon the promotion of Justice Irene Cortes as dean of the College of Law. Yorac
would devote fifteen years to teaching and would develop a reputation as a professor so
intimidating that students who wanted to enter the college were warned that if they could survive
an initial interview with Haydee Yorac, they could survive anyone else. She also became famous
for successfully objecting to the graduation of President Ferdinand Marcos’s daughter Imee
because she had not fulfilled the academic requirements at the law school.
Not only did Yorac want to participate in the larger world she had discovered at U.P., she
also wanted to practice the nationalism she had imbibed there. She pondered the nature of a just
society and the corresponding role of the individual human being. “I found that the system