README.md

Philippine Legal Documents Dataset

A comprehensive collection of Philippine legal documents from Lawphil.net, extracted from HTML to Markdown and organized for easy querying.

Overview

This dataset contains 114,340 legal documents spanning from 1900 to 2025, including:

• Jurisprudence (68,080 documents) - Supreme Court decisions
• Statutes (19,793 documents) - Republic Acts, Commonwealth Acts, Presidential Decrees, etc.
• Executive Issuances (26,458 documents) - Administrative Orders, Executive Orders, Memorandum Orders, etc.
• Constitutions (9 documents) - Philippine constitutions from different periods

Categories

Category	Description	Sources
juris	Supreme Court decisions and jurisprudence	juris
statutes	Legislative acts and statutes	acts, repacts, comacts, bataspam, presdecs
executive	Executive issuances and orders	ao, execord, mo, mc, proc, genor
consti	Philippine constitutions	consti

Source Details

Source	Description	Years	Count
juris	Jurisprudence / Supreme Court decisions	1901-2025	68,080
acts	Acts of the Philippine Commission/Assembly	1900-1935	4,257
repacts	Republic Acts	1946-2025	12,071
comacts	Commonwealth Acts	1935-1946	733
bataspam	Batas Pambansa	1978-1994	887
presdecs	Presidential Decrees	1972-1986	1,845
ao	Administrative Orders	1936-2025	2,811
execord	Executive Orders	1900s-2020s	5,750
mo	Memorandum Orders	1900s-2020s	2,401
mc	Memorandum Circulars	1900s-2020s	2,220
proc	Proclamations	1901-2020s	13,195
genor	General Orders	81
consti	Constitutions	1902, 1916, 1935, 1943, 1973, 1986, 1987	9

Usage

Loading the Dataset

import pandas as pd

# Load the consolidated dataset
df = pd.read_parquet("lawphil_consolidated.parquet")

print(f"Total documents: {len(df):,}")
print(f"Columns: {df.columns.tolist()}")

Filtering by Category

# Get all statutes
statutes = df[df['category'] == 'statutes']

# Get all jurisprudence
jurisprudence = df[df['category'] == 'juris']

# Get all executive issuances
executive = df[df['category'] == 'executive']

Filtering by Source

# Get only Republic Acts
ra = df[df['source'] == 'repacts']

# Get only Executive Orders
eo = df[df['source'] == 'execord']

# Get only Administrative Orders
ao = df[df['source'] == 'ao']

Filtering by Year

# Get documents from a specific year
docs_2020 = df[df['year'] == 2020]

# Get documents from a date range
docs_2000s = df[(df['year'] >= 2000) & (df['year'] < 2010)]

Reading Document Content

# Get a specific document
doc = df.iloc[0]

print(f"Title: {doc['title']}")
print(f"Source: {doc['source']}")
print(f"Year: {doc['year']}")
print(f"Path: {doc['path']}")
print(f"\nContent:\n{doc['content'][:500]}...")

Searching by Keyword

# Search in titles
results = df[df['title'].str.contains('labor', case=False, na=False)]

# Search in content
results = df[df['content'].str.contains('corruption', case=False, na=False)]

Schema

Column	Type	Description
id	string	Unique identifier (format: {source}:{path})
source	string	Document source (e.g., repacts, execord, juris)
category	string	High-level category (juris, statutes, executive, consti)
year	int	Year of the document
month	int	Month of the document (for jurisprudence only)
path	string	File path relative to project root
basename	string	Filename without extension
title	string	Document title extracted from content
content	string	Full markdown content

Statistics

• Total Documents: 115,340
• Date Range: 1901-2025
• File Size: 753 MB (consolidated parquet)
• Sources: 14 different legal document types

Data Source

Documents were originally sourced from Lawphil.net, a project of the Arellano Law Foundation.

License

The original documents from Lawphil.net are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0.