The Philippine IT Law Journal

[ LegalWeb ]
Lawphil.net: A step in the right direction
by Carlyn Marie Bernadette C. Ocampo-Guerrero and Michael Vernon M. Guerrero

This section is a continuing series of articles featuring various websites which may be relevant to legal practitioners, legal researchers, and law students.

Lawphil is a legal web site project of Arellano Law Foundation thru its Information Technology Center. Arellano Law Foundation is a non-stock non-profit institution specializing in legal education. Realizing the essence of making the law accessible and understandable not only to the legal community but to all sectors of society, the Foundation has embarked to digitize and make available through the Internet all Philippine laws, statutes, jurisprudence, presidential decrees, executive orders, administrative orders, lawyers' tools and other legal materials.

Hence, the LawPhil Project of the Arellano Law Foundation (www.lawphil.net) is one of the more ambitious projects in the legal field that have been initiated to provide law practitioners and law students with tools for legal research. It is so far the most comprehensive repository of Philippine jurisprudence and laws.

Composition, structure, and look and feel

The website is encoded according to HTML 4.0 standards, with javascripts, imagemaps, and standard web image files (.gif and .jpg). The website is structured in a three-panel frameset: a masthead, a navigation bar, and the main body itself. The frameset structure allows flexibility in the gradual expansion of the website. The website is composed of 11 sections: (1) the Constitution, (2) Statutes, (3) Executive Issuances, (4) Jurisprudence, (5) Courts, (6) Administrative Agencies, (7) Congress, (8) News and Legal Updates, (9) International Law, (10) Legal Links, (11) and Lawyer's Tools. Sections 1 to 4, and 9 contain the bulk of relevant laws, treaties and jurisprudence. Sections 5 to7 are informative as to the kind of political and legal system that exists in the Philippines.

The section on the "Constitution" contains all Philippine Constitutions: the Malolos, the 1935, the 1973, and the 1987 Constitutions. "Statutes" contains subsections pertaining to various kinds of statutes in different era in Philippine history - Acts, Commonwealth Acts, Republic Acts, Batas Pambansa and Presidential Decrees. "Executive Issuance" contains the subsections Executive Orders, General Orders, Memorandum Orders, and Proclamation. "Jurisprudence" contains decisions and resolutions promulgated from 1901 to 2003, as of this writing. The section on "International Law" contains the subsections Treaties, International Agreements, International Organizations, and International Courts.

"Courts" contains information involving the Philippine Court System, Rules of Court, Jurisdiction, Legal Ethics, Bar Matters, Roll of Attorneys and the Integrated Bar of the Philippines; while "Administrative Agencies" contains information pertaining to the Constitutional Commissions (The Commission on Audit, Commission on Civil Service, and Commission on Elections), the National Commissions (Commission on Human Rights, National Commission on Indigenous People, and the National Commission on the Filipino Language), the Office of the President, the Office of the Vice President, the various departments, the Bases Conversion Development Authority (BCDA), Social Security System (SSS), Government Service Insurance System (GSIS), Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board, Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council, Pag-IBIG Fund, Career-Executive Service Board, Local Water Utilities Administration, National Commission for Culture and the Arts, National Youth Commission (NYC), Professional Regulation Commission, and Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. The section on "Congress" includes the directory, officers and committees and the rules of both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

"News and Legal Updates" includes Legal News, Current Issues, Latest Laws, and Latest Supreme Court Decisions; while "Legal links" includes subsections on General Legal Resources, Online Law Libraries, Online Publications, Government Resources, General Resources, and International Resources. Lastly, the section on "Lawyers' Tools" includes Legal Forms, Legal Dictionaries, and Miscellaneous items.

The website's look and feel corresponds to the familiar online experience one acquires when browsing through the central repository of Supreme Court issuances, the Philippine Supreme Court website (www.supremecourt.gov.ph).

The development of the site is clearly one that is aggressive and distributed. It is aggressive in such a way that the site has at least 41,400 site elements by October 2003, a leap from 21,700 site elements existing March 2003, or a 198 percent increase in site content for a period of only seven months. It is distributed as additional content is being generated to include more recent laws, jurisprudence, etc. without compromising the inclusion of older laws, jurisprudence, etc. which have not been previously included in the repository. It is likely that the inclusion of older laws and jurisprudence, promulgate for a span of a hundred years would be completed within a couple of years or so, considering the pace of development as to the consolidation of legal content.

Surfers' comments

"The site is user-friendly. The main page readily shows the laws that have been recently passed, as well as the current legal issues. There is a search tool which I can use to locate certain issues or topics. The scroll bars on the left side of the page which include the Constitution, statutes, executive issuances, jurisprudence, courts, administrative agencies, congress, news and legal updates, International law, legal links and lawyer's tools, encompass various subject matters, though not as comprehensive as a well-known CD based research tool, in general. As to the design, it is simple yet appealing, specially the photos that are captured on the front page. Lawphil.net, as a whole, is a helpful and easy access research tool which will definitely be of use to me as I hurdle my remaining years in law school." -MI

"The site is a step in the right direction, considering that the website provides the ordinary surfer a whole range of legal resources, without fees, and thus provides a means to avoid the invocation of 'ignorantia legis non excusat.' It is a concrete step of bringing the law to the people. Still, by way of providing unsolicited advise, the search tool may be a feature that needs to be improved on, to highlight the words being looked up (although this is available through the use of the site's cached pages in a very popular search engine, but the starting point resulting to this kind of search right now is through the search engine and not the website), or to find cases corresponding to the proprietary citations of case compilations of the two biggest law book publishers in the country, among others. Inter-linked pages, wherein cases are linked to the cases and laws cited are linked, are also suggested. These, of course, after the site has completed the incorporation of most of the older laws and jurisprudence into the website." -RS

"Quite inconspicuously, with the advent of the computer age, the endeavors involved in the justice system took an abrupt giant leap from manual to mechanical. The justice system as understood five (5) years ago or so is very much different from how it is now. The element which greatly affected this change is the birth of cyber-legal research tools which are made readily available in just a click of the mouse. With the proliferation of these research tools, the quality of legal services that lawyers cater to litigants, the quality of the decisions promulgated by courts, the legal knowledge of the "laymen" (litigant or otherwise); and the legal research methods for public or private consumption, to name a few, have all been significantly enhanced. With this modern method, we may call what we have now as a "modern justice system".

"In the Philippines, one of the forerunners of "cyber-legal information dissemination" is the Lawphil.net. Among all of the available local websites concerned with the same objectives, Lawphil has an idiosyncratic brand of having the most updated materials as far as Supreme Court decisions are concerned. This positive distinction has been brought about by the ingenious idea of its creators to start compiling these Court decisions starting, and concentrating more, from the more recent rulings, while striving, in equal pace, to complete the files of the earlier ones. This is just a brilliant way to start establishing the site for after all, only subsequent rulings supersede the rest. Lawphil's layout is just systematic and user-friendly. Even first-timers find using it orderly and comprehensible. Laws and statutes updates and segments on current legal issues are very instructive and enlightening.

"The publication and distribution of legal information, in forms of laws, jurisprudence and legal opinions, etc., (local or global), generated by Lawphil has rendered the maxim "ignorantia legis neminem excusat" almost moot and academic, at least as far as those who have comparatively usual access thereto are concerned." -JL