Online Legal Resources

A major problem after graduating from law school is staying up to date with legal developments in the Philippines as well as in international law if you’re interested in policy and advocacy work. Blogging also requires a constant source of news to write about so my first order of business is to hunt for legal resources which will be useful for future law practice and blogging.

Official News, No Secondhand Fake News

Since I’m a tad completist [an obsessive, typically indiscriminate, collector or fan of something], I decided to be kept in the loop of all news from the websites of the following offices:

Supreme Court
Official Gazette
Department of Justice
Public Attorney’s Office
Office of the Solicitor General
Sandiganbayan
Office of the Ombudsman

I’m ambitious enough to attempt to keep track of all their websites and find inspiration and material to blog about but the main challenge is to receive notifications that the sites posted new content. The websites offer subscription but via email, an option which is too tedious and would only end up cluttering your inbox. Thankfully, there’s an app to aggregate all the sites even those without RSS feeds and you can get your news fix by using just one app.

I’m using Inoreader, a news aggregator which allows web pages to be saved. The URLs of the sites you want to follow who don’t have RSS feeds can be saved as a page in the app. Here’s the desktop version:

The mobile version is also handy and allows multiple actions like sharing and saving over cloud services.

That covers only news. It’s improbable to read all the content from all the aforementioned websites and yet still live a life in the real world. It would be more practical to follow opinion sources who have already analyzed the news and gave it legal significance but another challenge is to look for credible opinion makers.

Opinion Sources

By opinion sources, I don’t mean politicians and other policy makers, I refer instead to professionals, legal scholars and the academe who analyze and give solid legal bases for their opinions.

Blogs

Blogs are useful opinion sources and helps in identifying gray areas in the law. I’ve yet to find a blog on Philippine legal news and trends which particularly piqued my interest.

But I did stumble upon the American Bar Association’s BLAWG 100 Archive. The ABA recognizes outstanding legal blogs [which they call blawgs] and I browsed through a few of them. The quality of the content in the featured blogs were intimidating and awe-inspiring but it ruined me for local blogs which just pales in comparison.

I’ll be updating this section once I find a local blog at par with the ABA blawgs.

Research Sources

Law Journals and Law Reviews

Law journals are student publications and its impressive how the fearless the critiques are on Supreme Court decisions.

UP Law Journal – they have journals going back to 1914!
Ateneo Law Journal

Statistics, Demographics, Survey Sites

Philippine Statistical Authority – Philippine Statistical Yearbook
ProCon.Org – Awesome site. Gives the pros and cons on controversial issues with arguments from experts and scholars. Stumbled into this site in my research for my article on sex workers

International Law