In the Philippines, lawyers and laymen alike believe that when courts make decisions, they are completely value-free and non-politica~ and that to be so is a good thing. This belief has been elevated in popular discourse to the level of sacred ideal and in legal discourse enshrined as hard doctrine. This paper explored this belief as both philosophically and historically wrong. judges do not merely interpret rules and facts/ they actively create meanings and take part in building our normative universe. Jet the claim to neutrality was part of the ideology of colonization, which found it useful to have a superficially impartial judiciary to cloak a politics of nascent imperialism.