Atty. Romel R. Bagares

Biography

Romel studied communication research and law at the University of the Philippines. He worked as a reporter for The Philippine Star while enrolled in the evening program of the UP College of Law, where he also served as an editor of the prestigious Philippine Law Journal, the country's longest running academic legal periodical. After six years of juggling journalism and law, he was graduated in 2003 and received the 1st Myres S. McDougal Prize for Best Paper in International Law and Jurisprudence and the Justice Irene Cortes Pri^efor Best Paper in Constitutional Law. In the same year, he took the bar examinations and passed. Romel now works as an associate at the Makati City-based Roque and Butuyan Law Offices. He also serves as Junior Fellow of an evangelical think-tank, the Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture (ISACC), a contributing editor to its Patmos Magazine, and sits as representative of the Philippine Coalition on the International Criminal Court (PCICC) in the Committee on Universal Criminal Jurisdiction organized by the UP Law Center. He is also editing and introducing with an essay a forthcoming book project tentatively titled This Necessary but Complicated and Risky Task: Doing Contextual Theology from a Filipino Evangelical Perspective, a landmark anthology of papers written by Dr. Rodrigo D. Tano, the acknowledged Dean of Filipino evangelical theologians. Romel - a native of General Santos City - recently won a full scholarship to study in the international master's program on social and political philosophy of the Free University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.