"I am very pleased to be here for the launching of Prof. Gomez-Somera’s 2-volume textbook, Credit Transactions: Notes and Cases. Stephanie Gomez was my student in Credit Transactions, and after her graduation she joined me in private practice. She also joined me in the Office of the President when I served as Chief Presidential Legal Counsel under President Fidel V. Ramos.
While in private practice, Atty. Gomez and I agreed on one thing: Credit Transactions is one of the most useful subjects. Whether you do litigation or corporate work, you encounter aspects of Credit Transactions in most of the cases you handle. It simply pays to be well grounded in the subject.
Sometime in the late 1980s, I suggested to Atty. Gomez that we write a book on Credit Transactions. She dutifully prepared an outline but in private practice you seldom have enough time for extra work like writing a textbook. So nothing happened to that book project of ours, solely due to my fault.
Now, more than twenty years later, I am very happy that Prof. Gomez-Somera has come out with this 2-volume work. The work follows the time-tested format of legal textbooks we are familiar with as graduates of the U.P. College of Law. There is the specific provision of law, followed by the author’s commentary, and then the applicable case or cases. But Prof. Gomez-Somera’s work goes beyond this. Citing authorities like the historian Niall Ferguson, she updates our understanding of the kind of credit instruments that brought down Lehman Brothers and ushered in the first global credit crisis of the 21st century. Prof. Gomez-Somera also goes back into history, like explaining the concept of interest in Roman, Christian and Judaic law.
If you have a firm grasp of Credit Transactions, then it is easy for you to understand the nature and risks of exotic instruments like derivatives, which are at bottom really credit instruments. In the future, financial and legal engineers will invent even more exotic instruments but they will remain credit instruments, maybe only riskier. Although the subject of Credit Transactions has not been seen as popular as subjects like Constitutional Law or International Law, the collapse of Lehman Brothers has taught us that the failure to understand the nature and risks of credit instruments may cause a painful global recession.
Prof. Gomez-Somera’s textbook certainly allows the diligent law student to have a firm grasp of Credit Transactions and to more than adequately prepare him or her to identify and address credit transaction issues in litigation or corporate work. This, I say, sums up the value of this 2-volume work."
Justice Antonio Tirol Carpio
