§ 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. 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 the current corpus reproduce text published by The LawPhil Project; 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 its check as verified, flagged, or unavailable; failed or incomplete checks remain unavailable. Related decisions are topic-screened separately against a bounded retained-text excerpt and do not form part of the statutory synthesis.
The statutory corpus contains 8,296 provisions across 57 instruments: the 1987 Constitution, major Codes, and selected statutes and rules. Its 4,164 jurisprudence records form a dated, incomplete snapshot from 2019 through April 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 a deployment of Refoundation, the same engine behind 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 reproduce text published by The LawPhil Project; procedural rules were sourced separately. The jurisprudence catalog reproduces LawPhil decision records from its bounded 2019 through April 29, 2026 snapshot. Statute relationships on case pages are extracted citations and do not by themselves establish a holding or application. The retrieval and verification methods are described on the technology page.
This site reproduces public-domain legal text for research and public access. It is information, not legal advice, and nothing here substitutes for consulting a licensed Philippine attorney about a specific matter.