PiotrSty/law-ph-english-tagalog

Philippine jurisprudence & statutes (law_ph) - government works

Supreme Court decisions (juris) and statutes (statutes - Republic and Commonwealth Acts, Batas Pambansa, Presidential Decrees) of the Philippines, 1900-2025, re-derived from bettergovph/gov-library (HTML->Markdown extraction of LawPhil.net, Arellano Law Foundation) with per-record provenance (LawPhil path/URL, G.R. number, date).

• Source rows in scope: 87,873 (upstream total 114,340 incl. executive issuances and constitutions - out of scope here)
• Retained records: 85,534 (97.3%) - juris 65,843 + statutes 19,695
• Measured cl100k_base proxy tokens: 346,701,560
• Characters: 1,472,572,736
• Time span (document dates): 1900 - 2025-07-01 (year precision; month where available)
• Language reality: the Philippine legal register is English-dominant - candidate language votes: 85,586 en, 31 tl. Per-record detected language is in artifacts/attribution.jsonl; this is a Philippine-legal corpus, not Filipino-language practice text.

License - evidence at the origin

• Government works: RA 8293 (Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines), s. 176.1 - "No copyright shall subsist in any work of the Government of the Philippines." Statutes and court decisions are such works. Proviso to note: commercial exploitation of government works requires prior approval of the originating agency (s. 176) - a usage condition, not a copyright. Per-record license field: LicenseRef-PD-Official.
• Chain-of-title gaps, stated plainly: LawPhil.net (Arellano Law Foundation) is a digitization mirror of government texts, not the rights source; the bettergovph/gov-library packaging declares no licence at all (its README ## License section is empty) and its scraping/extraction code is not published with the package. release: None pending the standard rights review.

Samples

Verbatim records from artifacts/sample.jsonl, real line breaks preserved (markdown footnote markers from the HTML extraction are kept as delivered), truncated with [...].

Sample 1

id: law_ph_juris-datasets-markdown-juris-2000-10-gr-117949-2000-
source: law_ph
created: 2000-10-01
token_count: 5909
author: Supreme Court of the Philippines

**G.R. No. 117949 October 23, 2000**
PEOPLE OF THE PHILIPPINES, plaintiff-appellee, vs. **ALEX BANTILLO, ERNESTO ASUNCION, LARRY ASUNCION, RODOLFO ATANAS, PAQUITO FERNANDEZ and ANORING BADANDO,** accused, **ALEX BANTILLO, and ERNESTO ASUNCION,** accused-appellants.
**QUISUMBING, *J.:***
This is an appeal from the decision[1](#fn [...]

Sample 2

id: law_ph_juris-datasets-markdown-juris-1928-03-gr-28050-1928-m
source: law_ph
created: 1928-03-01
token_count: 2567
author: Supreme Court of the Philippines

**G.R. No. 28050 March 13, 1928**
FEDERICO VALERA, plaintiff-appellant, vs. **MIGUEL VELASCO,** defendant-appellee.
*Jose Martinez San Agustin for appellant. Vicente O. Romualdez, Crispulo T. Manubay and Placido P. Reyes for appellee.*
**VILLA-REAL, *J.:***
This is an appeal taken by Federico Valera from the judgment of the Cour [...]

Sample 3

id: law_ph_juris-datasets-markdown-juris-2016-05-gr-183129-2016-
source: law_ph
created: 2016-05-01
token_count: 8559
author: Supreme Court of the Philippines

**May 30, 2016**
G.R. No. 183129
COCOPLANS, INC. and CAESAR T. MICHELENA, Petitioners, vs. **MA. SOCORRO R. VILLAPANDO,** Respondent.
PERALTA, *J.:*
Before the Court is a petition for review on certiorari under Rule 45 of the Rules of Court seeking to reverse and set aside the Decision[1](#fnt1) dated February 4, 2008 [...]

Filtering

From upstream consolidated.parquet rows (categories juris + statutes): whitespace normalization -> labelled-only PII redaction (e-mail, labelled phone, labelled IP, labelled PhilSys/PhilID/TIN/SSS/GSIS/passport identifiers, PH account candidates: 53 e-mails and 49 labelled identifiers replaced; bare dotted quads and case numbers deliberately untouched) -> language gate (langid on first 1,000 chars; keep en/tl) -> cross-document boilerplate line filter -> exact + near dedup (sha256 of normalized text; Jaccard >= 0.90 on capped 25 x 5-word shingle sets) -> duplicate-id guard.

Rejections (sum exactly to 2,339; one decision per row in artifacts/decisions.jsonl): 1,312 out of language scope / 673 low letter-ratio / 215 duplicate upstream ids / 65 too short (min 200 chars) / 41 exact duplicates / 33 near-duplicates.

Known limitations

• English-dominant register (see above); tl records are rare.
• Markdown extraction residue: footnote markers [1](#fn...) and emphasis markers survive in a share of records.
• Judgments name private persons (parties, attorneys, witnesses) - not anonymized; a SlayerLab/NERGAL-style review is required before release.
• Executive issuances and constitutions are in the upstream package but out of scope here.
• created is year (month where the upstream records one); 215 rows shared upstream ids with different content and were rejected as duplicate_id.

See artifacts/ for attribution, per-record decisions, QA counts, samples and checksums. verify() passes (85,534 texts reconstructed from the extracted source, token counts recomputed); tests 6/6.