How it works
Search Philippine law — real, cited, and ranked by authority.
BatasDB doesn't write legal text. It reads a verified library of Supreme Court decisions and Republic Acts, finds what matches your question, ranks by legal authority, and summarizes only what it actually found.
The flow
What happens when you search.
Four steps, usually under 200 milliseconds from start to finish. Each step has its own job — and none of them makes up facts.
- 01
You ask in plain language.
Type a question the way you'd ask a lawyer — in English, Filipino, or a mix. You can also paste a specific citation ("G.R. No. 214830", "Article 315 RPC") and go straight to it. No special symbols, no keyword guessing.
- 02
We search Philippine law only.
Two searches run side by side — one that matches meaning, one that matches exact text — across roughly 320,000 sections of Supreme Court decisions and Philippine statutes. Nothing foreign, nothing made up, nothing outside our library.
- 03
We rank by legal authority, not just text match.
A tax circular isn't the Constitution. An SC en banc ruling outweighs a division decision on the same question. Results are ordered by how much authority a document actually carries — so the binding answer comes up first.
- 04
A short summary, based only on what we found.
A plain-English summary reads only the matching passages and cites them back. It never invents legal text. If the answer isn't in our library, the summary says so instead of guessing.
What we cover
Philippine law only.
A focused library makes for a sharper search. BatasDB only covers the laws and rulings that actually bind a Philippine court — nothing else.
- Supreme Court decisions
- En banc, division, and per curiam rulings from the e-Library, refreshed regularly.
- Republic Acts & Codes
- Full statute text, split where the law itself splits (section, article, paragraph) — so every result is citable.
- Freshness
- Newly published SC decisions and newly enacted statutes are added on a rolling schedule. Repealed provisions are flagged.
- Scope
- Philippine law only. No U.S. case law, no UK statutes, no legal blogs cluttering your results.
Two ways in
Use the website, or plug it into your own app.
Same ranked results, same evidence-based summary. Pick whichever fits how you work.
For lawyers & researchers
The website.
Sign in, type a question, read ranked results and an evidence-based summary in seconds. Every search is saved — open any past one again without re-running it.
Open BatasDBFor developers
The API.
One POST to /search returns ranked results, match scores, and citations — ready to feed your AI app or show in your own interface.
Go deeper
Read the details.
The short version is above. For the how-and-why behind each stage:
Deep dive
How search works.
Why we read questions and laws differently, how we combine meaning-based and exact-text matching, and why we split laws the way they split themselves.
Read →Deep dive
How ranking works.
The full authority ladder — Constitution, statute, SC en banc, division, agency circular, and everything below — plus how we weigh each tier.
Read →Try it on a question you already know the answer to.
The fastest way to trust a search system is to give it a question you can already verify. Free tier included, no credit card.