USC Law graduates Breden F. Arcayos and Nicole Marie P. Carreon won major awards in the Foundation for Liberty and Prosperity (FLP) Dissertation Writing Contest 2021-2022. The awards were announced on July 26, 2022. 

Funded by the Ayala Group and in cooperation with the Philippine Association of Law Schools, FLP awards papers that best explain and espouse the Foundation’s philosophy of “liberty and prosperity under the rule of law”. 

Arcayos grabbed the second prize with her dissertation entitled, “Balancing Security and Liberty: A Comparative Study on Domestic Anti-Terrorism Laws vis-à-vis Human Rights Obligations of States Under International Human Rights Law” with Atty. Rashid Pandi as her thesis adviser. 

Meanwhile, Carreon bagged the third prize with her dissertation, “The Code as Law and the Code of Law: The Legal Challenges in Adopting Stablecoins as Securities under the Securities Regulation Code and other Laws” under the advisory of Atty. Noel C. Felongco I. 

Aside from Arcayos and Carreon, two more USC Law graduates were chosen as finalists, namely: Chrisha Ver Romano-Weigel for her thesis entitled, “The Boat People’s Crisis: Transforming the Law of the Sea to Accommodate Human Rights Norms, Clarify the Parameters of the Duty to Rescue, and Create a New Nexus for Imputing State Responsibility on the High Seas” and Edward Dominic Emilio for his thesis, “Prometheus Unbound: Establishing the Human Right Against Information Vacuums”. Assistant Dean Atty. Daryl Bretch M. Largo was their thesis adviser.

Last year, two USC graduates also bagged major awards in FLP’s Dissertation Writing Contest.