KARTILYA.PH, a free and public archive of the law of the Philippines, has launched at kartilya.ph. Built by Filipino lawyer and technologist Karlo Dizon, it lets anyone search the law by meaning and ask questions about it in plain language, with every answer checked against the actual text of the statute or decision before it is shown.
The law of the Philippines is already free to read. It has long been published by The LawPhil Project, the Official Gazette, and the Supreme Court E-Library. But it is scattered across legacy sites that are difficult to search and impossible to question directly. KARTILYA.PH is built on the premise that availability is not access: it rebuilds the law the institutions already freed into a single corpus that can be searched, asked, and verified.
The archive currently spans more than 50 major Philippine statutes and over 8,000 individual provisions, from the 1987 Constitution and the Civil, Revised Penal, Labor, Family, and Tax Codes to recent legislation, alongside more than 2,500 Supreme Court decisions. Every answer the platform gives is passed through a citation check that confirms each authority against the real text of the law, so the tool does not invent citations. The site is free to read and search, and no account is required.
“The law of the Philippines has been free to read for years. It has not been easy to use,” said Karlo Dizon, founder of KARTILYA.PH. “Availability is not access. KARTILYA.PH is an attempt to make the law the country already owns something a citizen, a student, or a lawyer can actually search and understand.”
The name is drawn from the Kartilya ng Katipunan, the 1896 primer that taught ordinary Filipinos their rights and duties. The framing is deliberately civic: a kartilyais a primer, and KARTILYA.PH is intended as the people’s primer to the law. The launch comes as Congress considers proposals for a free, consolidated, AI-searchable national database of Philippine law and jurisprudence; KARTILYA.PH offers a working, independent reference for what such a system can look like in practice.
KARTILYA.PH is the Philippine deployment of Refoundation, the engine behind Territorial Review, a free, AI-searchable archive of the law of the U.S. territories. Both are built on a single idea: public law should be not just available, but usable.
About the founder
Karlo Dizon is 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. He began his career in appellate, constitutional, and regulatory litigation at WilmerHale in Washington, D.C., and serves on the New York State Bar Association’s Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies.
