Philippine Legal Corpus · Updated April 2026

Search Philippine law the way you think.

Natural language search over Supreme Court decisions and Republic Acts — from a clean dashboard or directly via API. Grounded in real Philippine legal data.

app.batasdb.ph/search
History

Writ of Amparo habeas corpus

2h ago

right to counsel during custodial investigation

5h ago

just compensation eminent domain

1d ago

illegal dismissal burden of proof

2d ago

Republic Act 9262 VAWC penalties

3d ago

Legal Search

Search Philippine law and jurisprudence using natural language.

What is the Writ of Amparo?
4 results 143 ms
AI Summary

The Writ of Amparo is an extraordinary remedy providing protection to persons whose right to life, liberty, and security is violated or threatened by any public official or private individual. It covers situations of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings.

SC Decision G.R. No. 214830
96% match

Dela Cruz v. Office of the Solicitor General

The writ is a remedy available to any person whose right to life, liberty and security is violated or threatened by an unlawful act or omission of a public official or private individual…

SC Decision G.R. No. 198742
91% match

Reyes v. Commission on Human Rights

Petitioner filed for the issuance of the writ on grounds that respondents failed to investigate alleged threats to his life and liberty despite repeated requests for protective measures…

Sub-200ms median latency · Dashboard + API · Hosted in Manila on AWS

What you get

Built for how legal research actually works.

Whether you're a lawyer, researcher, or developer — one platform, real results, grounded in Philippine law.

Natural Language Search

Ask questions the way you'd ask a lawyer. No Boolean operators, no keywords — the engine understands meaning, not just words.

Dashboard + API

Search from the web dashboard with no code, or integrate via REST API. Both use the same ranked results and AI summary.

Near-Zero Hallucination

Every result is grounded in real SC decisions and Republic Acts. The AI summarizes only what it finds — it never invents cases.

SC Decisions + Statutes

Search across Supreme Court decisions and statute provisions in one place. Filter by document type to narrow your scope.

Search History

Every dashboard search is saved. Revisit previous results instantly — no repeat charges, no re-querying.

Zero-Retention AI

AI queries are never stored or used for model training. Your searches stay private — and your corpus of truth stays fixed.

The moat

Not all legal documents carry equal weight.

Philippine law is a hierarchy of authority. The Constitution outranks statutes. Statutes outrank executive orders. Executive orders outrank agency IRRs. An en banc Supreme Court ruling overturns a division ruling.

A generic RAG system ignores this. BatasDB doesn't. Every result is ranked by legal authority tier — so the Constitution, a controlling SC en banc decision, and the Republic Act on point surface above a departmental circular on the same topic.

Authority tier

The eight-rung ladder

Constitution

1987 Constitution — supreme law of the land.

Treaty / Rule of Court

Ratified treaties and rules of procedure that bind all courts.

Statute

Republic Acts, Batas Pambansa, Commonwealth Acts, Presidential Decrees.

SC en banc

Supreme Court sitting en banc — overrules division rulings.

SC division

Supreme Court division decisions — binding unless reversed en banc.

Presidential issuance

Executive orders, administrative orders, proclamations.

Agency regulation

IRRs, department orders, BSP / SEC / BIR circulars.

Local ordinance

City and municipal ordinances — narrowest authority.

Tier feeds directly into result ranking. A near-perfect semantic match on a BIR circular loses to a solid match on the controlling Republic Act — as it should.

Generic RAG

Retrieves by semantic similarity alone. A 2010 BIR circular on the same topic as the 1987 Constitution can outrank the Constitution just because the wording is closer. Dangerous.

BatasDB

Retrieves by semantic similarity multiplied by authority tier, then filters out repealed, superseded, and overruled documents. Controlling sources always surface first.

Why this matters

  • Stare decisis. Philippine courts follow a strict hierarchy of precedent. Citing a lower-authority source as controlling is a professional error.
  • Effectivity. An IRR implementing a repealed statute has no force. BatasDB tracks effective · amended · repealed · superseded status and downranks accordingly.
  • En banc vs division. Only the SC sitting en banc can overturn its own en banc rulings. Our ranking distinguishes them; generic vector search can't.

We're not a chatbot. We're not basic RAG.

We're a retrieval engine that understands Philippine legal authority — because anything less is malpractice waiting to happen.

Why accuracy matters

In legal research,
hallucination is malpractice.

General-purpose AI tools generate plausible-sounding case citations that don't exist. Lawyers have already been sanctioned for submitting fabricated rulings to courts around the world.

BatasDB doesn't generate legal text. It searches a verified corpus of real Supreme Court decisions and Republic Acts, then summarizes only what it finds. Every citation maps to a real document you can verify.

Every result is grounded in real, verified Philippine legal documents.

Disbarment

Lawyers who cite fabricated cases face disciplinary action — including suspension or disbarment — for misleading the court.

Case dismissal

Motions built on hallucinated citations get thrown out. Judges have sanctioned attorneys for filing AI-generated briefs with fake case law.

Client harm

Wrong legal advice based on invented precedent can cost clients their freedom, property, or livelihood. The stakes are not theoretical.

BatasDB: search, not generation

Results come from a curated legal corpus — not from a language model making things up. What you see is what exists.

Getting started

Live in minutes.

Search from the dashboard with no code, or plug the API into your app. Either way, you're up and running fast.

For lawyers & researchers

No code required

01

Create a free account

Sign up at app.batasdb.ph. No credit card required.

02

Open Search and ask

Type your question in plain Filipino or English. Get ranked SC decisions and statutes with an AI summary — in seconds.

03

Revisit anytime from history

Every search is saved. Click any past query to load its results instantly — no re-search, no charge.

Open dashboard
For developers

One API call away

01 · Get your key

export BATASDB_KEY=bb_live_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

02 · Search

curl -X POST https://api.batasdb.com/search \
  -H "X-API-Key: $BATASDB_KEY" \
  -d '{"query":"right to counsel","limit":5}'

03 · Use the results

// result.case.gr_number → G.R. No.
// result.match.excerpt  → relevant passage
// result.source.url     → official e-Library
// result.score          → relevance 0–1
Get API key

Use cases

Who searches with BatasDB.

From solo practitioners to development teams building the next generation of Philippine legal tools.

Research

Lawyers & Legal Researchers

Find the right case in seconds, not hours.

Skip the manual e-Library browsing. Ask a natural-language question and surface ranked SC decisions and statutes with an AI summary grounded in real jurisprudence — near-zero hallucination.

Get started
AI / RAG

AI Legal Assistants

Ground your LLM in real Philippine jurisprudence.

Use BatasDB as the retrieval layer in a RAG pipeline. Feed verified SC decisions and statutes as context before generation — so your AI never invents a case that doesn't exist.

Get started
Compliance

Compliance & LegalTech

Automate statute lookup at scale.

Filter by statute_provision to find the exact legal text for any business scenario. Build compliance tools, contract checkers, or internal legal portals — all on real, current Philippine law.

Get started

Near-zero hallucination — by design.

General-purpose AI models often fabricate case citations, invent GR numbers, or misstate the law — because they were never trained on the full Philippine legal corpus. BatasDB retrieves real, verified documents first, then summarizes only what it finds. Your answers are grounded in actual jurisprudence, not approximations.

Philippine law, at your fingertips. For free.

Search from the dashboard — no code, no setup. Or integrate via API. Free tier included, no credit card required.