Full text of the transcripts of the Estrada impeachment, including the pre-trial
As far as we know, we are the only site which has this impressive collection online, collected in one place. Of course, other sites are expected to follow I love competition
The transcripts of the Estrada impeachment could be found as downloadable ZIP and DOC files in a former senator’s website (although not linked from the main page, which could only mean that the webmaster intended to hide those files) and in HTML format in a website which seem to have been last updated ten years ago.
Journalist Raissa Robles, the same woman who asked GMA how was her sex life, raised an interesting perspective on the Ramgen Revilla murder. She advances the idea that the legal status of Genelyn Magsaysay vis-a-viz Don Ramon Revilla may have changed after the death of his legal wife:
When Azucena died in 1998, Genelyn’s legal status MAY have changed under Philippine law. She was no longer The Other Woman. She MAY have become The Companion of the former Senator Revilla, who by then became a widow[er].
She then cites Articles 147 and 148 of the Family Code. Students of Persons and Family Relations law know that both articles belong to the chapter on property regime of cohabiting couples; Article 147 when there was no legal impediment for a marriage and Article 148 for cases where a legal impediment exists.
Later Robles commented on the October 14, 2011 Facebook post of Genelyn, wherein she shared a picture of herself and Don Ramon with the comment “consecration”:
Is that the equivalent of a Catholic marriage? Or was Genelyn spinning a fantasy for herself?
I don’t know. But if that was a marriage, then Genelyn gets half her husband’s fortune.
Even if untrue, the Family Code of 1987 MAY still protect her and her children, as I mentioned earlier.
That Genelyn will get half of Don Ramon’s properties is completely wrong.
Articles 147 and 148 must be read together with Article 130 of the same Family Code. Genelyn’s getting a share in Don Ramon’s wealth is entirely dependent on whether there was a valid liquidation of the Azucena-Don Ramon conjugal partnership. But apparently we don’t see the children of Azucena and Don Ramon getting their shares, so the conjugal partnership property must not have been liquidated. In this case, the last paragraph of Article 130 will apply:
“Should the surviving spouse contract a subsequent marriage without compliance with the foregoing requirements, a mandatory regime of complete separation of property shall govern the property relations of the subsequent marriage.”
In this scenario, Genelyn will never get half of Don Ramon’s properties. She will only get a share equal to one legitimate child; in this case the legitimate children will be the children of the Azucena-Don Ramon and Genelyn-Don Ramon marriages.
Be the first to comment - What do you think? Posted by
islesv -
November 8, 2011 at 12:41 am
The Philippine Supreme Court has released in its website an online version of the official court reporter, Philippine Reports. We have tried the user interface of the tool, and it is very intuitive (unfortunately for us, more intuitive indeed than our own jurisprudence search tool). It contains 27,000 cases decided from 1985 to 2010. According to the user manual, some cases come with scanned copy of the original document, in Portable Document Format (PDF). This means you can actually verify the text, without going to the nearest law library to check the Philippine Reports volume containing the case.
The search function allows you to search for one or more words in a document; you can choose among Extended (the words must be in the document), Any Word, or Exact Phrase. You can also search either only decisions, only resolutions, or both decisions and resolutions. You can search by date range, by division, and even by ponente. (Since when did we at PhilippineLaw.info promise this capability and yet until now we haven’t delivered yet? Yes, you’re correct, we were still known as iJuris then, and iJuris at that time was still at the personal website of Vincent Isles. That’s like almost four years ago.)
Where will PhilippineLaw.info’s Jurisprudence Database be after this release? It will still be around. After all, there are certain things that the Supreme Court’s online Philippine Reports does not offer, but which we can. For one, the Supreme Court version contains (as of now) only cases from 1985 up. On the other hand, we have from In re Aguas onwards. Also, our primary aim before was really to produce the referring cases to a certain case, and it seems that this is not in the features list of http://philrep.judiciary.gov.ph/
On a related note, we have fixed the case citations up to 105 Phil. This was the biggest incremental update since the transfer to a new host last year, no thanks to the fellow who had nothing more important to do last June 21, 2011.
As PhilippineLaw.info nears its 4th anniversary this third week of November, 2011, we are proud to offer our newest section: the Philippine legal bibliography. We aim to compile in this bibliography, accessible free via the Internet, information about Philippine law books and articles.
And before other sites claim they are the first in this… Well, they always claim that, but ours is fact
Be the first to comment - What do you think? Posted by
islesv -
September 27, 2011 at 10:11 pm
When I started conceptualizing the Philippine jurisprudence database in November 2007, innovation from existing websites was foremost in my goals. Then the database was named iJuris, referring to the interlinked nature of the cases. One of the goals was to make sure that each and every case referred to in a case is linked to the right page. That is, you see the citation to A v. B, and that citation is linked to the decision of A v. B. It took me more than three years to process cases, but I was not able to interlinked more than 20,000 case citations.
Another goal was to help the user search for case decisions via Google using the citations for Philippine Reports and the Supreme Court Reports Annotated (SCRA). I wanted a way for law students, lawyers and law enthusiasts to type in Google (or any other search engine for that matter) citations such as “A v. B, 123 SCRA 456″ and the user should be directed to the correct case. This was the part where iJuris/LawPH.com/PhilippineLaw.info was most successful. So successful, in fact, that we earned the jealousy of other webmasters. Last January, I sold LawPH.com to a friend after a Carlos Arellano harassed us, accusing us of hacking LawPhil.net and another web site. I was handling so many things at that time, and although I did not commit any wrong, I wanted to be rid of the harassment (after all, it seemed to me that the target of Carlos Arellano was really to just bring LawPH.com/PhilippineLaw.info down – the site’s rise in the rankings must have hurt his AdSense earnings). Nevertheless last March I repurchased LawPH.com and renamed PhilippineLaw.info, after my friend gave up trying to understand my coding methods Then last July, PhilippineLaw.info was hacked, and the entire case information database table was deleted. Since I have sold the site in January, I did not have backups. The latest one I located was from November/December 2008, one year into starting the site. Worse, I messed up doing the resurrection of the case info table, and a lot of garbage resulted.
In the end though, not everything turned out to be bad. Because of the hacking last July, I saw a different method of producing the references, this time automatically. From 20,000 links, we now have more than 200,000 links. These are the ones you can see at the end of each case – the “referencing cases”.
Why would this be important? Although the process of extracting this information was semi-automated, it could still tell you which later cases refer to this current case. You have to check each referencing case though on how it modified/maintained the holding in the current case, but at least you have a guidance. This is called “Sheparding” and we are proud to be the first site to offer this service, and for free.
As iJuris/LawPH.com/PhilippineLaw.info turns four years old, it will be offering better and more innovative services.
2 comments - What do you think? Posted by
islesv -
July 18, 2011 at 9:55 am
This post is for those of you who might be wondering why the jurisprudence database contains so much garbage these days.
Last Tuesday, June 21, 2011, somebody tried and succeeded in “hacking” certain portions of the website. You don’t have to worry about your password security if you have an account at the forum; I am 100% sure that the “hacker” was NOT able to access your encrypted password from the forum database. The forum is using the latest version of MyBB, a robust forum software scripted by an active community of developers – you can be assured that it does not have security loopholes, or if there are, they are fixed immediately. Also, there was no evidence from our access logs that the attacker tried to take a deeper look at the forum, perhaps precisely because it was using the latest version of MyBB.
The problem stemmed from a web-accessible script for dumping MySQL data into databases. Somehow the attacker happened to know the URL of the script, which was not linked to by any page and therefore was not indexed by search engines. I admit the name of the file was a bit easy to guess though.
The attacker was able to destroy the following database tables from our jurisprudence database:
the table containing case information such as the parties, the division which decided the case, the writer of the opinion, etc.
the table containing footnote information (four years after I designed the original database, I could not understand why footnote information has to be placed in its own table footnote information was placed in another table to allow “previewing” the note when the user places the cursor over the footnote link)
I don’t know why the attacker did not simply delete all the other tables in the database – after all, if he guessed the names of those two tables he deleted, it would had been easy to guess the names of the other tables, esp. the most important one containing the text of the cases themselves – but I was glad that he did not.
The attacker did not simply delete all the other tables in the database, esp. the table containing the full text of the cases, presumably so that no red flags will be raised right away. After all, users would consider miscitation of cases as something which the webmaster may address later, but not if all case decisions are gone from the site. Also, he did change many of the case text, by changing the enye character here and there, deleting a space here, etc. We are trying to identify a pattern to this (there must be a pattern; he could not have done everything by random) so that we could fix the problems programmatically.
Update 7/11/11: It took almost a month, but we now realize what the goal of the attacker was: insert and change materials in our database so that it would seem that these were copied from LawPhil.net. Perhaps the deletion of the case information table was accidental or just a test if an update/delete operation could be done. When this was confirmed, the attacker then inserted new lines in certain pages where the corresponding pages in LawPhil.net have these new lines. This procedure was also done for misspellings. I think it is possible in MySQL to find the latest changed rows (even without a timestamp column) – if this was possible and I had known the attacker’s true purpose, I would have been able to identify the changed rows (case text) right after the attack and identify the changes.
The footnote information was easy to repair, since the footnotes themselves were still in the text. I had run a script to convert the old coding to the new one, but there were some glitches.
The case information table is the bigger problem. Unfortunately, we did not have a recent backup of this database table, because we wanted to forget about LawPH.com back in January, when a “Carlos Arellano” harassed us. The latest backup that we had was a November/December 2008 dump. Fortunately, we had that. Unfortunately, we totally bungled the restoration process. The result is the total mess that you are looking at right now.
It would take years to fix the database. I don’t have the luxury of time anymore – I’m on my third year of law school. Still, I will try to fix as much as I can in my free time. If you want to help, you can post a comment below or email me directly at islesv at gmail dot com. Take note though that I would not be able to pay you – the income from Google AdSense here is just enough to continue running this thing.
2 comments - What do you think? Posted by
islesv -
June 24, 2011 at 6:54 am
You have case digests and you are in need of money? We might be able to help.
We have opened the Case Digests Database to provide a venue for law students to not just share their case digests but to earn money as well. Check out the terms and add your case digest today!
Along with our re-purchasing the site (if you remember we sold it last January 27, 2011 because of certain harassment issues which later turned out to be baseless – we will write more about this in the future), we have also redesigned it and transferred it to a new domain.
Everything should be working fine, except that we have dropped some directories, esp. the /phrases directory – we realized it was not really serving our membership, so it has to go.
4 comments - What do you think? Posted by
islesv -
June 4, 2011 at 6:58 pm
I love competition 
