Document Type

Presentation

Date of this Version

4-2009

Comments

2008-2009 Penn Humanities Forum on Change
Undergraduate Mellon Research Fellows

http://humanities.sas.upenn.edu/08-09/fellows_uhf.shtml

Abstract

Nicole E. CuUnjieng, College '09, History

The Regime of Ferdinand Marcos and the Role of the Supreme Court of the Philippines

My research centers on the Philippine political tradition and contextualizing

President Ferdinand Marcos's 1972-1986 dictatorship within that perspective. I wish to intervene within the existing academic debate on the nature of this

tradition. Challenging the established scholarship, which presents Marcos's

regime as the anomaly of the Philippine patronage system, I instead argue that Marcos is the perverse apotheosis of the system. I wish to argue that Marcos embodies all the ills already present in Philippine politics and merely brings them to their extreme conclusion. More recent scholars have also championed this reading and I wish to further develop the argument by examining the legitimizing role that the judiciary played in this history.

Date Posted: 09 September 2009