CivilLaw.PH aims to make every material legal statement traceable to an authoritative source. This policy explains which sources we prefer, how we cite them, and how we separate the law itself from our editorial explanation of it.
Source hierarchy
Primary sources are preferred whenever they are available. For the subjects this site covers, that means:
- The Civil Code of the Philippines (Republic Act No. 386) and the Republic Acts, presidential decrees and special statutes that amend or displace it – among them Presidential Decree No. 1529 (the Property Registration Decree), Republic Act No. 11573, Republic Act No. 11576, the Condominium Act, the Maceda Law and the Urban Development and Housing Act.
- The Constitution, where a constitutional limit or guarantee bears on the question.
- Procedural law: the Rules of Court, including the rules on civil procedure, evidence, ejectment, estate settlement and the Rules on Expedited Procedures in the First Level Courts.
- Judicial authority: decisions of the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court E-Library.
- Registry and agency procedure: issuances of the Land Registration Authority and the Registry of Deeds, the DENR, the Bureau of Internal Revenue, the Philippine Statistics Authority, the DILG, the DHSUD and the Department of Agrarian Reform, used to explain how a step is actually carried out.
- Unofficial repositories: privately maintained collections such as LawPhil, published by the Arellano Law Foundation, are useful for locating and reading legal text, but they are not government publications. Where an official and an unofficial copy of the same provision both exist, the official one governs.
Secondary sources
Commentaries and academic writing may help explain context, but they do not replace controlling law, and where a secondary source conflicts with an official one the official source prevails.
We do not build a legal proposition on a private law firm’s summary of the law. Where a firm’s article is the only thing saying something, that is a signal to go and find the provision, the rule or the decision it is describing – not a source to cite. Competitor and market research is a separate activity from sourcing, and nothing learned that way is published as authority.
Citation practice
Guides identify the governing provision as precisely as is practical: the article of the Civil Code, the section of the statute or decree, the rule and section of the Rules of Court, or the case name, G.R. number and promulgation date. Every guide carries a Sources block listing the authorities it relies on, with links to an official or reliable copy.
Where we quote a codal provision, we quote it as it appears in the official text or as reproduced verbatim in a Supreme Court decision. Where we could not verify the exact wording from a permitted source, we paraphrase the provision and cite it by number rather than presenting our paraphrase inside quotation marks.
Jurisprudence
A case discussion should state the facts that mattered to the ruling, the issue, the holding and the doctrine applied. A decision is not presented as a universal rule where its application depends on particular facts or on later cases.
Where two decisions genuinely diverge – and in Philippine civil law they sometimes do – we say so and cite both, rather than choosing the one that produces the tidier answer.
Editorial explanation
Plain-language explanations, decision snapshots, evidence tables, worked examples, checklists and step lists are editorial material. They exist to help a reader understand and locate the controlling source, and they are not the text of the law. They should never be cited as authority.
Unavailable or changing sources
Where an official source is unavailable, incomplete or temporarily inaccessible, a guide may rely on a reliable alternative and will identify the limitation. Jurisdictional thresholds, filing fees, tax rates, registry procedures and prescriptive periods are treated as volatile and are rechecked against the issuing source rather than carried forward.
This policy should be read with our Editorial Policy and Research Methodology and our Content Review Policy.
Last materially reviewed: 11 September 2026.