§ About
KARTILYA.PH is a free research archive of selected Philippine legal materials: the 1987 Constitution, major Codes, selected statutes and rules, and a dated jurisprudence snapshot. It is a research aid, not a source of legal advice. A kartilya is a Tagalog word for a primer, and this is the people’s primer to the law.
§ What this is
Publication and structured research serve different functions. KARTILYA.PH organizes a selected body of Philippine legal text by instrument and provision, allowing the collection to be searched by meaning as well as exact phrase.
Most statutory materials in this corpus are third-party reproductions published by the Arellano Law Foundation; procedural rules were sourced separately. KARTILYA.PH parses these selected materials into addressable provisions while preserving their place within each instrument.
The answer engine synthesizes from retrieved statutory provisions. Each cited answer point reports a source check as verified, flagged, or unavailable; failed or incomplete checks remain unavailable. These checks address source support, while an answer can still be incomplete, outdated, or wrong. Related decisions are screened separately against a bounded retained-text excerpt.
The statutory corpus contains 8,296 provisions across 57 instruments: the 1987 Constitution, major Codes, and selected statutes and rules. Its 4,181 jurisprudence records form a dated, incomplete snapshot from 2019 through July 29, 2026. Links between decisions and statutes record citations, not necessarily a holding or application.
Lawyers, students, public servants, and citizens consult the same legal texts. KARTILYA.PH provides public access to this selected research corpus without an account or subscription.
§ Who built this
KARTILYA.PH is built by Karlo Dizon, a lawyer and technologist from Bataan. He earned a B.A. with distinction in political science from Yale, an M.Sc. with distinction in comparative politics from the London School of Economics, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. Along the way he held internships at the White House and in the United Kingdom Parliament. He began his career in appellate, constitutional, and regulatory litigation at WilmerHale, and serves on the New York State Bar Association’s Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies.
KARTILYA.PH is built with Rein Serrano, its Tech Lead. A graduate of the Ateneo de Manila University in Management Information Systems and a full-stack software engineer at Manulife, he brings the discipline of enterprise software to the work of making the law searchable and dependable.
KARTILYA.PH is built with Tessa Borja, its Policy Lead. Her career spans journalism, language pedagogy, legal research, and senior roles in the Guam Legislature. She has served as Director of Policy and Communications for the Office of the Honorable Shelly V. Calvo, where she drafted statutory language, coordinated interagency engagement, and developed messaging on language access and disability rights. Earlier, she directed committee operations for the Office of the Honorable Benjamin J.F. Cruz, and served as Senior Law Clerk at the Public Defender Service Corporation, drafting substantive motions, legislative measures, and public testimony.
Before entering law and policy, she taught English and academic writing at the University of Guam and Guam Community College. She began her career as a reporter and assistant editor at Marianas Variety-Guam. She holds a J.D. from the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, an M.Ed. in TESOL from the University of Guam, and a B.A. in English from the University of Guam.
KARTILYA.PH shares its underlying research engine with Territorial Review, a free archive of the law of the U.S. territories. Both start from the same premise: paywalled legal research is the norm nearly everywhere, and it should not be. The law of a place belongs to the people who live under it.
§ Sources & method
Most statutory materials are third-party reproductions published by the Arellano Law Foundation; procedural rules were sourced separately. The Third-party source archive is retained for inspection. The jurisprudence catalog is a dated, incomplete snapshot of Supreme Court decision records. Source links identify whether each record is official or third-party where that status is established. Statute relationships on case pages are extracted citations and do not by themselves establish a holding or application. Sources, coverage, and currency can change, so check current official text for a live matter. The retrieval and source-checking methods are described on the technology page.
This site reproduces legal text for research and public access. Its automated explanations and answers may be incomplete, outdated, or wrong. They are information only, not legal advice, and do not create an attorney-client relationship. Consult a licensed Philippine attorney about a specific matter, especially where a deadline, filing, transaction, liberty, or legal right is at stake.
§ Before you ask
Please do not enter names, contact details, case facts, health or financial information, privileged communications, or other confidential or sensitive material. Questions are processed by third-party AI and search providers, and limited service data may be retained for operations, including short-lived answer caching. The question box is not a confidential channel.