It i s with deep sorrow that the CALESA team announces that Professor Rubén F. Balane, a renowned lawyer and civil law expert in the Philippines, who taught at Ateneo de Manila University and the University of the Philippines, passed away on Monday, 11th October 2021.

To express our great sorrow, CALESA´s coordinator, José Manuel Perea (Peping), wrote an epitaph in his honour:

Yesterday Professor Ruben Balane passed away.
With him all a generation of Filipinos who lived and thought in Spanish said goodbye, he was also the last exponent of a rich civilistica tradition in the Philippines.
Ruben was and is as great as he is humble, a great lover of Spanish culture, a Maestro with capital letters, a wise, simple and good person like no other I have encountered in my worldly life.
He always conserved the restlessness, curiosity and humour of a child, never stopped studying, open to different arts, polyglot, erudite, a renaissance soul. But above all, he was a good man who left an indelible mark, who left an unfathomable void.
His dream was to recover the bond of twinning between the Philippines and Spain, at least the legal bond; and fate would have it that he passed away with his dream fulfilled. Thanks to the Calesa project and various Erasmus initiatives, a group of idealistic professors have united under his lap and we share concerns and hopes to achieve a better University and a better Law, and he is the only one to blame.
Our legacy is to water the seed that Rubén has sown and nurture it with great care.
Rubén, the day I met you my life changed definitively, thank you for showing me the way, thank you for making me your family, thank you for sharing your friends and giving me so much hospitality and warmth, you will always be alive in my heart,
Peping