Project Status

Written by Super Administrator | 01 January 2007

While Corpus Juris aims to be the premier provider of online legal research materials and tools, this is easier said than done. In order to further this goal, the Corpus Juris web development team is embarking on a large-scale project of scanning, digitizing, and formatting original copies of laws, jurisprudence, and legal references for the site. To better appreciate the inherent difficulties to be surmounted and the volume of material to be incorporated in this project, the following statistics are pertinent:

• Acts - 4,275 public acts enacted by the Philippine Assembly from 1901 to 1935.
• Commonwealth Acts - 733 laws passed from 1935 to 1946.
• Batas Pambansa - 844 laws passed by the Batasang Pambansa (National Assembly) from 1979 to 1985.
• Presidential Decrees - 2,034 enactments of the President from 1972 to 1986.
• Republic Acts - Congressional enactments from 1946 to 1972 and from 1987 to the present. There are now over 9,000 Republic Acts.
• Jurisprudence - more than 45,000 decisions of the Supreme Court promulgated from 1901 to the present.

To say that processing this large an amount of text is difficult would be an understatement. However, with the benefit of advanced technologies in the field of image scanning, text processing, web design, and database management, the task becomes more manageable. Indeed, work is moving at a steady pace.

Currently, Corpus Juris is still under construction. The development team has already completed the site’s database, navigation, and content framework. This is the most crucial step as it determines how efficient and organized data is to be implemented in the database. Currently, a large batch of content will be ready for upload and posting. After this, the frequency of updates will continue to increase as we endeavor to publish all the laws and jurisprudence from 1901 to 1950, thus reaching around 1/3 of the total available resources to be posted. Please come back regularly to see the latest updates.