• GILBERT P. BAYORAN
Negros Occidental Third District Rep. Javier Miguel Benitez has filed a bill seeking to create a free, consolidated, and artificial intelligence (AI)-searchable national database of Philippine statutes and jurisprudence.
It is a digital public infrastructure for the rule of law itself, he said.
House Bill 9468 seeks to establish the Philippine Open Law System, a free consolidated, continuously updated, searchable, accessible and publicly available legal information platform for Philippine laws, rules, regulations, jurisprudence and other legal issuances.
“This creates the public infrastructure necessary to help Filipinos locate and understand the law they are already required to obey,” Benitez said.
In his privilege speech on May 25, the Negrense lawmaker called out “a quiet injustice” in the Philippine legal system, where every Filipino is bound by laws most cannot easily access, or worst cannot find.
“We have ended up with two tiers of law in one Republic. One for those who can pay to understand it, and one for everyone else,” Benitez said.
The text of Philippine statutes is technically free available through the Official Gazette and the Supreme Court E-Library.
However, the version that actually works, one that is consolidated, current, and searchable, sits behind commercial subscriptions out of reach for ordinary citizens, the neophyte lawmaker said.
Benitez argued the Philippines could leapfrog rather than catch up.
Independent testing has found that even purpose-built legal AI tools fabricate answers more than one time in six, a problem that shrinks dramatically once the AI is anchored to a verified, consolidated database of real Philippine law.
To private legal publishers, Benitez said the measure takes nothing from them as the plain text of the law was never theirs to sell. Commercial firms, he said, remain free to compete on commentary, analysis, and tools built on top of the law.
Benitez further said that the law already belongs to the Filipino people, and that the State has only to finish the job of putting it in their hands. | GB
