Why some laws win
over others.
When you search for a law on a topic, several different documents will mention it. A good search has to tell you which one actually decides the answer — not just which one uses your words the most.
Philippine law is a pecking order.
Imagine you're asking a lawyer about tenant rights. The lawyer pulls out a stack of documents — all of them mention "tenant". One is the Civil Code. One is a Supreme Court decision from 1995. One is a Quezon City ordinance. One is a department circular from 2015.
They're not equal. A good lawyer already knows which one controls. Philippine law is organized as a clear hierarchy — from the Constitution at the top down to local ordinances at the bottom. Every rung below has to obey every rung above it.
Authority ladder
The rungs
Constitution
The 1987 Constitution — the highest law of the land. Every other law bends to it.
Treaty / Rule of Court
Ratified treaties and the rules of court procedure. Bind every court in the country.
Statute
Laws passed by Congress — Republic Acts, Batas Pambansa, Commonwealth Acts, Presidential Decrees, the Labor Code.
Supreme Court (en banc)
The Supreme Court's final word on a case — all 15 justices together. Can overturn earlier rulings.
Supreme Court (division)
A smaller group of justices (3 or 5) decides. Binding until the full court disagrees.
Presidential issuance
Executive orders, administrative orders, proclamations from the President.
Specialized appellate court
Court of Tax Appeals and Sandiganbayan — handle tax disputes and anti-graft cases. Binding within their jurisdiction; persuasive on the Supreme Court. En banc rulings rank above the divisions.
Agency regulation (binding)
Implementing rules with delegated rule-making force — like BIR Revenue Regulations issued under the Tax Code. Must follow the statute they implement.
Agency regulation (interpretive)
Clarifications and circulars — like Revenue Memorandum Circulars. Useful guidance, but not binding on courts.
Local ordinance
City and municipal ordinances. The narrowest reach — only binding within that local government.
Why "best word match" is dangerous for law.
Most AI search ranks by how well the wording matches your question. That's fine for finding pizza places. For finding the law that decides your case, it's a recipe for wrong answers.
Here's the failure mode. You search for the law on fraud. A 2014 tax bureau circular happens to use the word "fraud" a lot — and the wording lines up closely with how you asked. Generic search puts it on top. The real answer is Article 315 of the Revised Penal Code, sitting a few results below.
A tax circular cannot override the Revised Penal Code. Ever. Surfacing it on top isn't just imprecise — it can send someone down the wrong path entirely.
What we do instead.
Every document in our index carries its spot on the ladder. When you search, we combine three signals: how well the wording matches, how much authority the document actually has, and how recent it is. Authority does the heavy lifting. Recency only breaks ties between equally on-point sources — old leading cases stay authoritative, because in law they should.
The effect is simple. A near-perfect wording match on a low-authority source — like that tax circular — still loses to a solid match on the controlling law. The Constitution, the statute on point, the binding Supreme Court ruling: those come first. The circular that happens to share your words stays further down, where it belongs.
Not all Supreme Court rulings are equal either.
The Supreme Court decides cases in two ways. Sometimes all 15 justices sit together — that's called en banc, and it's the court's final word. Sometimes a smaller group of 3 or 5 justices decides — that's a division. Division rulings are binding, but the full court can overturn them.
If you cite a division ruling that was later overturned en banc, you're citing dead law. Generic search can't tell the difference — it sees two Supreme Court decisions and calls them equal. We tag which is which, and rank accordingly.
Dead law stays flagged, not hidden.
Laws get amended. Laws get repealed. A circular implementing a law that was later repealed has no force anymore. But if we just deleted those from the database, historical research would be impossible.
So we keep them — and mark them. Every document is tagged as effective, amended, repealed, or superseded. Effective ones surface in normal search. Anything retired gets downranked, so you don't rely on law that no longer binds anyone.
We're not a chatbot. We're not generic AI.
We're a search engine that understands which law outranks which — because in Philippine legal practice, getting that backwards is how you lose cases.
Try it for yourself.
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