Advocates come and go, but the name of Manohar Usgãocar will remain etched in the minds of the Goan Bar and the public for a very long time.
A diminutive man without a physical personality as such, but once you knew him, you could never forget him. In Law, he was the rare combination of forensic art and juridical science. He had the famed 7th year Portuguese Lyceum and the advocates Charter of the erstwhile Goa High Court. He didn’t need an LLB or an LLM or a PhD or even a plain graduation. He didn’t need a University. He himself was one.
He was a studious man and a good teacher. His logic and imagination were unbeatable. He would discover something that was always there but you never noticed, and thereby trap his opponents. Some hated him for his obsession and enthusiasm for his cases, causes and clients, but that was the very source of his prodigious authority in the field. His well-known and obvious contribution is to what is known as “Portuguese Law”. As early as 1978, he got the Family Laws of Marriage, Divorce etc, translated and in 1986the Family Laws Vol II, dealing with Succession. These books were used for 4 decades by lawyers, judges and Courts upto the Supreme Court and often referred to as the “Goa Family Laws”. Because of him, this law survived. His great contribution to the Bar was the ‘Goa Law Times’ initiated in 1989, which gave us for the first time, the judgements of the Goa Bench of the Bombay High Court. In 1997, he organised an International Conference on the Civil Code, which all the important jurists and lawyers of Portugal, Goa and the rest of India attended.
In 2017, he translated the full Portuguese Civil Code and Portuguese Code of Civil Procedure into English. His very valuable contribution to Goan Law is his footnotes, notes, notings, articles, etc in the Goa Law Times, going deep into the conceptual and jurisprudential aspects of matters. He also gave a series of lectures on the Civil Code in the Institute Menezes Braganza which were published in the form of Booklets. He loved Private International Law/ Conflict of Laws and Comparative Law.
However, his mark was not only on Portuguese law but in many other areas, especially on the Civil side. In 1978 he obtained a stay on the amendment of the Goa Agricultural Tenancy Act, which remained in force for 12 years till 1990, resulting in a tremendous impact on the socio-economic and even political life of the land.
At the personal level, you found in him an irresistible sense of humour. He had some cute jokes in Marathi but recounted in Konkani, which made you laugh like there was no end. He knew many languages including French and maybe Latin, but he was most at ease with some of us in the sweet old Goan idiomatic Portuguese.
He was the sourcebook and reference point to advocates from all parts of Goa, from Bardez to Quepem. I have seen his office open till beyond midnight and senior lawyers waiting outside for a piece of advice. He always had an answer or at least an indication of where you must look for an answer. He lost his beloved wife some years back and leaves behind his son Sudin, a Senior Advocate, Adv Sudesh and Suharsh an engineer, all of whom have a lot with him.
