Just finished working on my case digests for Torts & Damages class and reading up for Tax class tomorrow so I’m having some really precious downtime right now. With this opportunity in hand, I thought it best to get this blog back on track and update you with the things I’m currently working on and things yet to do.

The new school year started last June and I’ve got a pretty good schedule this semester. I’m really excited that I’ve finally got Dean Virgilio Jara as my professor in Civil Procedure! Finally being in one of my favorite professors is absolutely wonderful. This prof really knows the subject matter and makes excellent use of the Socratic method for teaching the different law concepts and theory. Believe me, Socrates himself would be proud.

Torts & Damages seems pretty good as well. I’ve always enjoyed Civil Law and pretty much all subjects included therein and Torts is no exception. The cases are especially interesting, covering all manner and types of acts and omissions that people do to each other. Quite a number of those cases make for some really interesting reading and a few of those are downright hilarious. It just blows me away to see the really stupid things these people do. Like this one guy, may he rest in peace, jumped off a ship to retrieve his P2 bill that blew into the ocean. I mean, even given inflation rates since the 1950s, no person in his right mind would jump into the sea to retrieve their money that was blown away and risk getting eaten by sharks or, in this case, drowning. Anyway, I digress. Suffice it to say, that I’m really enjoying this class and our professor, Atty. Rita Jimeno is doing a pretty good job of keeping things interesting and directing our attention to both the big picture as well as the little details.

There’s this wonderful vibe that comes from studying Civil Law. I have this really great respect for the Philippine Civil Code and its framers. It’s really well-organized, well thought out, and conforms to the most basic of human logic. Especially when you’re dealing with obligations and contracts, there’s this beautiful symmetry to all of it, not too unlike dealing with mathematical formulas. Of course, that’s as much a product of the evolution of these basic legal tenets across several hundred years and a handful of civilizations spanning from the Romans, French, Latin Americans, the Spanish, and finally our own local legal developments. Definitely my all-time favourite law subjects have been Civil Law-based.

Downloads-wise, I’ve been stocking up on a lot of older TV shows that I’ve either haven’t watched at all or haven’t completed because they weren’t available locally on air or in DVD format. So far, I’ve completed Dawson’s Creek, Friends, 3^rd Rock from the Sun, Rome, The O.C., and the X-Files. Right now, I’m working on completing The Simpsons, Lost, Prison Break, Smallville, The Wonder Years, and Gossip Girl. Really good stuff here, though I’m most probably lacking in terms of exposure to the more recently-made shows.

Its funny that I mentioned Gossip Girl. While it undoubtedly caters to female teenagers, there’s something peculiarly charming about the series. I have to admit that the problems and situations faced by the main characters aren’t that particularly deep or thought-provoking, I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed shows that had lots of conflict in them. Believe me, this show just overflows with conflict. Not to mention that the girls playing Serena and Blair, Blake Lively and Leighton Meester, respectively, are just wonderful to watch. While Lively gives off just the right amount of playfulness that her character deserves, Meester looks and attitude offers the proper insecure-queen-bitch vibe that makes people love to hate Blair. Background music is also well selected in that its both youthful and appropriate to the respective scenes they’re supposed to go with. It also probably helps that Josh Schwartz, the guy who developed The O.C. is also on board Gossip Girl’s production.

Lately, work has been tapering on my biggest and currently sole web design project, The Corpus Juris. While I’ve gotten a little over 1300 cases uploaded which is already 8 years worth of jurisprudence, I’ve got more than 30,000 cases covering 100 more years of Supreme Court decisions. Most of the preliminary editing has been done but its the uploading process thats been pretty much beating the hell out of me. I mean, I’m a single guy working on this really HUGE project. While there probably is a way to streamline the whole operation, I’ve yet to get the time to actually plan and implement it. On the top of my head, I’m thinking of setting up a localhost-based Apache and MySQL, mirror the stuff I have on my webhost, and update the databases on my local machine. Once all that is done, I can upload the whole thing piecemeal to the webhost. Alternatively, I can probably use NaviCat and selectively update the databases on the host without touching my web statistics. Hmm… got a real bit technical there, sorry. Let me explain in more detail.

Me and my batchmate, Paulo, were quite fed-up with the difficulty in finding cases and laws pertinent to our legal research needs. Of course, there’s the obvious difficulty when working with books and printed works. Say, you want to find a case about bouncing checks. Where does one really start? Dewey Decimals be damned, there’s no real easy way to begin a physical search other than checking the books that one is already familiar with which, though probably citing the older cases would certainly not include the newer ones as they are promulgated. When you go online though, there’s a whole dearth of sources. There’s the Chan-Robles Law Office’s Virtual Law Library, Arellano Law Foundation’s LawPhil, CD Asia’s optical media-based Lex Libris, and of course the Philippine Supreme Court’s website. While these resources definitely have the obvious online search going for them, there’s still much left to be desired from using them.

For starters, Chan-Robles’ site looks like it was made by a teenager. With flashy, slow-loading graphics all over the place and bad choices of color and font sizes, usability is at an all-time low. LawPhil is much better, with a wide-selection of cases and laws but is, in no way, exhaustive. They also manage to insert their own name and other extraneous material that is totally not pertinent to the text itself. These things really don’t matter and they have the nerve to perform textual sacrilege on the text of the laws and jurisprudence. Its just about as blasphemous as things could get. To add to all this, their HTML and text semantics are all incorrect and invalid. None of their pages would validate against their respective DOCTYPEs, symbol usages were all over the place and none of them were properly cross-referenced. Sure, they’ve been spidered by search engines at least ten times over but any search you could perform would be limited to the soon-to-become archaic keyword search method. None of these engines really understand what’s written on those webpages.

Lex Libris is pretty good. The Advanced Search really is advanced in many, many ways. One can search by petitioner, respondent, citation, date, ponente, and inline text. But like lawphil, they try to brand the text with their names, the application itself is dated and uses older Win32 DLLs that are becoming dated and ugly. Not to mention, the onerous DRM that requires one to actually, physically phone home their servers in order to activate. And I’m not talking about using the internet but an actual modem that dials their phone number and makes different data pings to their server to validate the user’s account. Too much commercialism in there just about killed what would have been an otherwise good user experience.

What me and Pau wanted to do, on the other hand, is leverage the internet’s own resources to ease finding these legal texts. One cannot really argue that Yahoo! and Google’s search engines are way better at finding these things more than anything those mentioned above could muster. We wanted a purely web-based interface to find and display the texts required. We wanted to build natural-language searching into our search appliances which would automatically leverage any and all search engine developments that Yahoo! and Google could come up with. We wanted properly-formatted code that would validate even with W3C XHTML Strict standards. We dearly wanted to clear up all the old improper symbol usages and replace them with proper semantics and thus improve searching and usability. We wanted an SQL-based backend and an easily-templated frontend. We wanted to shake up this whole industry and improve the plight of every person who was interested in finding out about law. And thus was born Corpus Juris.

Truth be told, accomplishing all this was to be a mean feat. Heck, mean feat is quite the understatement as it is. The numbers of materials to be scanned, converted and edited are staggering and yet, we knew this project had to be done. As they say, one always looks to leave a dent in history and this might just be our means to achieve that.

Now, 6 months later, I’m finding myself short on time to keep a good momentum going. What with the relatively heavy academic load I have (not so much on the units, but rather the subject matters being taken up), and Pau already working, the project is going on a snails pace right now. Trust me, there’s a truckload of material that’s already been edited and just waiting to be uploaded but this last step is the one that is the most time-consuming.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we’ve given up. We’ve only just begun this thing and judging by our statistics, the site is already being actively used. This, in itself, shows the incredible potential of our project and I have a feeling (albeit probably biased) that usage will just snowball given more time. Ah, now I learn how true the saying about how valuable time is.

Ah well, its getting late so I’ll have to cut this entry short. Don’t worry, I won’t be gone for months (or years) at a time. There’s quite a little bit of time that I feel will be best for updating you guys on what I’m doing. As for this topic, I’ll write more on this next time so please come back. I’ll also leave updates on more personal matters for my next post.

See you then!

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