The Philippines is, by constitutional design, a republic governed by the rule of law. Article II, Section 1 of the 1987 Constitution declares: “The Philippines is a democratic and republican State. Sovereignty resides in the people and all government authority emanates from them.” This is not ornamental language. It is the foundational premise upon which every institution, every public officer’s oath, and every citizen’s right is anchored.
Yet in 2025, during a nationally televised Senate hearing on the flood control corruption scandal, Senator Erwin Tulfo declared: “Sometimes you have to bend the law to be able to please the people. Mas mataas po ang taumbayan sa batas.” He then turned to then-Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla and asked for affirmation. The Secretary of Justice—the highest legal officer of the Executive Branch—replied: “Yes, sir.”
And in February 2026, sixteen former Philippine Marines and two former Army personnel stepped forward with notarized affidavits claiming they had personally transported suitcases filled with cash—allegedly totaling ₱805 billion—to the residences of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., former House Speaker Martin Romualdez, and scores of legislators. The mainstream broadsheets, those self-proclaimed guardians of Philippine democracy, either buried the story or refused to publish it altogether.
These are not isolated incidents. They are the symptoms of a system in which the Rule of Law has given way to the Rule by Law—and, increasingly, the Rule of Men.
This essay examines the distinction between the Rule of Law and the Rule by Law (sometimes called the Rule of Men), and argues that in a political environment where the law itself is instrumentalized by those in power, artificial intelligence—particularly legal AI—becomes not merely a tool of convenience but a critical infrastructure for democratic accountability.
The Rule of Law holds that no person—regardless of rank, wealth, or political power—is above the law. It requires that laws be publicly promulgated, equally enforced, independently adjudicated, and consistent with international human rights principles. Under this framework, the law constrains the sovereign. Government exists to serve the law, not the other way around.
The philosopher Aristotle captured this in Politics: “It is more proper that law should govern than any one of the citizens.” The law, in this conception, is a neutral arbiter—impersonal, transparent, and resistant to the whims of individual rulers.
In the Philippine context, the Rule of Law is embedded in the constitutional framework through the Bill of Rights (Article III), the separation of powers (Articles VI, VII, VIII), the independence of the judiciary, and the system of checks and balances. The Constitution was deliberately crafted after the Marcos dictatorship to prevent any single individual or family from ever again holding the law hostage.
The Rule by Law, by contrast, is a system in which those in power use the law as a tool to maintain control, punish enemies, reward allies, and legitimize their actions—all while maintaining the appearance of legality. It is the weaponization of law. The forms of law are preserved—statutes are passed, courts convene, agencies operate—but the substance of justice is hollowed out.
Under Rule by Law, the question is never “What does the law require?” but “What does the ruler want, and how can the law be made to justify it?”
This is what “bending the law” means in practice. It is not a figure of speech. It is a governing philosophy. And when the Secretary of Justice affirms it publicly, it ceases to be an aberration—it becomes policy.
The Rule of Men is the logical terminus of Rule by Law. Here, the personal judgment, mood, or political calculation of those in power determines outcomes—not the law itself. Laws exist, but they are applied selectively: strictly against political opponents, loosely for allies, and not at all for the sovereign and his circle.
The Philippines has a long and painful history with the Rule of Men. Under Ferdinand Marcos Sr., Martial Law was declared in 1972 not to save the Republic but to extend one man’s rule indefinitely. Laws were passed by decree. Courts were packed. The Constitution was amended to serve the conjugal dictatorship. An estimated $10 billion was plundered from the national treasury.
The 1987 Constitution was written precisely to prevent this from ever happening again. And yet, barely forty years later, we find ourselves confronting the same patterns—not through martial law, but through the subtler mechanisms of institutional capture, selective prosecution, and the normalization of legal flexibility by those sworn to uphold the law.
The September 2025 exchange between Senator Tulfo and Secretary Remulla deserves closer analysis because it reveals the anatomy of how the Rule of Law is dismantled—not by a single dramatic act, but by a thousand small concessions.
The context was the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee investigation into the massive flood control corruption scandal—a scheme involving billions of pesos in ghost projects and inflated contracts under the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH). The investigation uncovered an estimated ₱110 billion in anomalous projects across multiple administrations, with the Department of Finance estimating approximately $2 billion in taxpayer losses between 2023 and 2025 alone.
Tulfo’s argument was that contractors and corrupt officials should be compelled to return stolen funds before being admitted into the Witness Protection Program (WPP). Senator Marcoleta correctly pointed out that restitution is not a legal requirement for WPP admission under existing law. Remulla acknowledged this but argued that requiring restitution was “morally right” and a “test of good faith.”
Here is the danger: when the Secretary of Justice adds requirements that do not exist in the law, citing morality and public sentiment as justification, the law ceases to function as a predictable, neutral framework. It becomes whatever the person in power says it is, depending on the political temperature of the moment. This is the essence of Rule by Law—and it is precisely what Davao City Police Office Chief Kahulugan warned against, invoking the maxim Dura lex sed lex: the law may be harsh, but it is the law.
The irony is devastating: the very people charged with fighting corruption have adopted the tools of arbitrary governance to do so. Senator Robin Padilla was right to raise concern. If the law can be “bent” to fight corruption today, it can be bent to protect the corrupt tomorrow. The mechanism is identical; only the beneficiary changes.
What makes the “bend the law” exchange so troubling is not merely its political implications—it is that the Philippine Supreme Court has already and repeatedly ruled on this exact question. The jurisprudence is clear, unambiguous, and binding. Any citizen with access to a legal AI tool like LEAi can find these rulings in minutes—which is precisely why democratized access to legal knowledge is such a threat to those who would bend the law.
1. The Law Must Be Applied As Written. The Supreme Court has consistently held that courts and officials cannot distort the law, even with good intentions. In Julio Agcaoili vs. Alberto Suguitan (1926), the Court declared: “It is by yielding to such influences that the courts and legislatures are gradually undermining and finally overthrowing constitutions… [I]t is my purpose, so far as it is possible for me, to follow the fundamental law of the land regardless of consequences.” This is not a suggestion. It is a constitutional mandate—one that applies to every branch of government, including the Department of Justice and the Office of the Ombudsman.
2. Bending the Law Constitutes Misconduct. The Court has explicitly condemned officials who bend the law, even out of compassion. In Gladdy S. Bernabe vs. Salvador A. Memoracion (1997), a judge was sanctioned for reducing a penalty beyond what the law permitted: “[He] overstepped his judicial limits when he reduced the penalty of conviction to one not permitted by law, believing perhaps that he could defy and disregard express statutory provisions in the name of leniency or compassion… This is more condemnable than gross ignorance.” If a judge cannot bend the law in the name of compassion, how can a Secretary of Justice bend it “to please the people”?
3. Good Faith Does Not Justify Abuse of Authority. In Lim vs. Ponce De Leon (1975), the Supreme Court citing Dr. Jorge Bocobo, Chairman of the Civil Code Commission, addressed precisely the argument Remulla made—that requiring restitution before WPP admission was “morally right” even if not in the law: “Precisely, the opening object of the article (referring to Article 32 of the New Civil Code) is to put an end to abuses which are justified by a plea of good faith, which is in most cases the plea of officials abusing individual rights.” Good faith is the oldest disguise of arbitrary power.
4. The Proper Approach: Law WITH Justice, Not Law Bent to Convenience. The Supreme Court itself has articulated the proper framework for reconciling law and justice—and it is not “bending.” In Alonzo vs. IAC and Padua (1987), the Court stated: “We interpret and apply the law not independently of but in consonance with justice. Law and justice are inseparable… What we do instead is find a balance between the word and the will, that justice may be done even as the law is obeyed.” The distinction is critical: interpretation in consonance with justice operates within the law’s framework; “bending” operates outside it, substituting the judgment of the official for the text of the statute.
These rulings are not obscure. They are foundational. And they demonstrate a crucial point: the answer to whether the law can be “bent” has already been given by the highest court of the land. The answer is no. When a citizen armed with a legal AI platform can retrieve these rulings in seconds, the information asymmetry that enables officials to bend the law with impunity collapses. The law can speak for itself—if the people have the tools to hear it.
The present administration of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. presents a paradox: it has enacted some notable legislation—the Anti-POGO Act, the E-Governance Act, the Government Optimization Act—yet the structural conditions for rule of law continue to erode. The flood control scandal revealed that corruption was not limited to a single agency but ran through the system, with allegations reaching lawmakers and even the presidency itself. Two impeachment complaints were filed in 2025, alleging offenses ranging from involvement in high-level corruption to dereliction of duty.
More fundamentally, the governance culture remains one of political dynasties and patronage networks. Political dynasties control an estimated 80 percent of seats in Congress. The 2025 midterm elections saw some opposition gains, but the structural concentration of power remains largely intact. Corruption in flood control projects alone cost taxpayers an estimated $2 billion—a figure that evokes comparisons to the Marcos Sr. era.
On February 24, 2026—the eve of the 40th anniversary of the EDSA People Power Revolution that toppled the elder Marcos—eighteen former military personnel—sixteen former Philippine Marines, one former Philippine Army soldier, and one Army reservist—appeared at a press conference at Club Filipino in San Juan City. Accompanied by anti-corruption lawyer Levito Baligod, they presented notarized joint affidavits claiming that from 2022 to 2025, they had served as security personnel for resigned Ako Bicol Party-list Representative Zaldy Co and, in that capacity, had physically transported suitcases—“maletas”—filled with cash to the residences and offices of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., former House Speaker Martin Romualdez, several senators, and approximately twenty-five members of the House of Representatives.
The scale of the allegations is staggering. Baligod claimed the total deliveries amounted to approximately ₱805 billion ($13.9 billion)—a figure that, while contested, approaches the magnitude of the estimated $10 billion plundered during the twenty-one years of Marcos Sr.’s dictatorship. The ex-military personnel described a systemized operation: cash would be prepared at Zaldy Co’s residence in Valle Verde, Pasig City, packed into large, medium, and small suitcases, paper bags, and envelopes, and then delivered by land and air—using vehicles in convoys, airplanes, and even helicopters—to designated drop-off points including the President’s home in Paoay, Ilocos Norte, properties at 41 Forbes Park, Bonifacio Global City, the Manila Polo Club, and other locations linked to high-ranking officials.
The affidavits detailed a logistics of corruption so specific as to invite verification: the ex-military personnel described a group chat where delivery instructions—destinations, recipients, number of suitcases—were posted. Each suitcase allegedly contained ₱48 million to ₱70 million. They claimed deliveries occurred as frequently as four times per week. They described the cash being referred to internally as “trash.” One of the former soldiers testified: “Nakapag-deliver po kami sa 41 Forbes po. Meron din po sa Ilocos, kasama po si Cong.” (We delivered to 41 Forbes. There were also deliveries to Ilocos, accompanied by the Congressman.)
The allegations corroborated earlier testimony. In September 2025, former Marine Master Sergeant Orly Guteza had appeared as a surprise witness before the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee, testifying that he personally hauled cash-filled luggage to the homes of Romualdez and Co. In November 2025, Co himself—now a fugitive who reportedly fled to Europe on a Portuguese passport—released a video accusing President Marcos of ordering ₱100 billion in budget insertions during the 2025 General Appropriations Act deliberations. Baligod’s press conference was the third wave of the same narrative, each more detailed than the last, each implicating the same constellation of officials.
Baligod put the matter bluntly: “Ang ugat at pinuno ng pagnanakaw sa ating bayan ay walang iba kundi si President Marcos, at hindi gagalaw si Speaker Romualdez at si Zaldy Co na walang pahintulot kay PBBM.” (The root and leader of the plunder in our country is none other than President Marcos, and Speaker Romualdez and Zaldy Co would not move without PBBM’s approval.)
Here is where the machinery of the Rule by Law reveals itself most nakedly. Under Philippine law, the sitting President enjoys immunity from suit during the term of office—a doctrine rooted in the practical necessity of preventing the Chief Executive from being paralyzed by litigation. But immunity from suit was never intended to be immunity from accountability. It is a procedural shield, not a substantive one. The President can still be held accountable through impeachment (Article XI, Section 2), through elections, and ultimately through criminal prosecution after leaving office.
Yet in practice, presidential immunity becomes a fortress. When the Palace dismisses ₱805 billion in sworn allegations as a “lousy script, not award-worthy”—the exact words of Palace Press Officer Claire Castro—the immunity doctrine enables not just protection from litigation but insulation from serious engagement with the accusations. The response is not legal. It is not institutional. It is theatrical. And it works because the institutional checks that should force engagement—Congress, the Ombudsman, the courts—are either controlled by allies or occupied by appointees whose own credibility is compromised.
Consider the chain: the Department of Justice was led by Remulla, who publicly affirmed that the law could be bent. Remulla has since been appointed Ombudsman—the very official tasked with investigating graft and corruption by public officers, including the President after leaving office. The Senate Blue Ribbon Committee, which was initially aggressive in its investigation, underwent a leadership change when Senate President Tito Sotto and Senator Ping Lacson assumed control—with Lacson publicly expressing skepticism about the Marines’ claims before any formal investigation, calling the figures “mind-boggling” and noting that “the numbers just don’t add up.” This is not adjudication. It is pre-judgment designed to frame dismissal as analysis.
The National Security Adviser, Eduardo Año, labeled the allegations “malicious, false and fabricated.” The Philippine Navy, rather than addressing the substance of the claims, focused on discrediting the witnesses—asserting that four of the eighteen were never members of the Navy or Marine Corps (two of whom were in fact former Army personnel, not Marines at all), and that many had been dishonorably discharged. The response pattern is textbook Rule by Law: attack the messenger, not the message. Discredit the source while avoiding the substance. Use institutional authority to frame the allegations as unworthy of institutional response.
Perhaps the most alarming dimension of the Marines scandal is not the corruption itself—Filipinos have, tragically, developed a tolerance for reports of grand corruption—but the response of the mainstream media. Or more precisely, the non-response.
On February 25, 2026, the day after eighteen former military personnel signed notarized affidavits accusing the sitting President of masterminding the delivery of hundreds of billions in stolen public funds, the Philippine broadsheets treated the story as though it did not exist. The Philippine Star’s banner headline that day was about possible succession talks. The Philippine Daily Inquirer led with an ICC story about the Duterte drug war—a story of no immediate consequence. Neither paper gave the Marines’ allegations front-page treatment. Television news offered brief mentions, if any, quickly drowned by other coverage.
When the broadsheets finally addressed the story, it was not to report the allegations but to publish the Palace’s denials and the Navy’s discrediting of the witnesses. The framing was inverted: the story was not “Eighteen Marines Accuse President of Plunder” but rather “Palace Dismisses Marines’ Claims as ‘Lousy Script.’” The journalistic choice to lead with the denial rather than the accusation is itself a form of editorial complicity. It transforms an adversarial press into a transmission belt for state messaging.
As columnist Rigoberto Tiglao observed in the Manila Times, this represents an unprecedented failure in post-EDSA Philippine journalism. Never in the forty years since the fall of the Marcos dictatorship have the major broadsheets collectively declined to publish sworn allegations of this magnitude against a sitting president. The silence was so conspicuous that Baligod himself alleged cash-filled suitcases had been delivered to a known “media operator” at President Tower along Timog Avenue in Quezon City—suggesting, though not proving, that the media blackout was itself purchased.
Only SMNI and Net25 covered the press conference. Only the Daily Tribune carried the story the following day. The rest of the media ecosystem—the same ecosystem that positions itself as the Fourth Estate, the watchdog of democracy, the inheritor of the “mosquito press” tradition that resisted Marcos Sr.’s Martial Law—chose silence.
This silence constitutes what can only be described as a de facto information martial law. Under Marcos Sr., the press was silenced by decree—newspapers were shut down, editors were arrested, printing presses were padlocked. Under Marcos Jr., the press silences itself. The mechanism is different but the outcome is identical: the Filipino public is denied the information it needs to hold power accountable. If Marcos Sr. achieved press control through coercion, Marcos Jr. appears to have achieved it through co-optation—through the economic dependencies and ownership structures that bind media proprietors to the very political class they are supposed to scrutinize.
The irony is that the Constitution’s guarantee of press freedom (Article III, Section 4) was written specifically because of the Marcos Sr. experience. The framers understood that democracy cannot function without an informed citizenry, and an informed citizenry requires a free and adversarial press. When the press voluntarily abdicates this function i.e. when it chooses not to report sworn allegations of presidential corruption—the constitutional guarantee becomes a dead letter. The law exists, but the institution meant to give it life has been hollowed out from within.
What the mainstream media refused to report, social media carried. The Marines’ affidavit, in both the original Filipino and English translations, went viral across Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms. Independent bloggers, community journalists, and concerned citizens—the digital inheritors of the “mosquito press” and the “Xerox journalism” that sustained the anti-Marcos resistance in the 1970s and 1980s—ensured that the story reached millions of Filipinos despite the broadsheets’ silence.
This development is significant for two reasons. First, it demonstrates the limits of information control in the digital age. A government can co-opt the broadsheets, but it cannot co-opt the entire internet—at least not yet. Second, it reveals a dangerous information vacuum. When established institutions refuse to verify, contextualize, and report the news, the narrative is shaped by those least constrained by verification standards. Every unanswered question is filled with speculation. Every delay in institutional response is interpreted as evidence of a cover-up. The broadsheets’ silence does not make the story disappear—it makes it wilder, less verified, and more susceptible to manipulation by all sides.
The Marines scandal, when viewed alongside the “bend the law” exchange, the Remulla appointment, and the media silence, reveals a governance ecosystem in which every institutional check on presidential power has been compromised. The Department of Justice was led by a man who affirmed that law can be bent. The Ombudsman is now that same man. Congress is controlled by allies. The Senate investigation has shifted from aggressive scrutiny to what critics describe as a “shameful coverup.” The media has been neutralized. And the President himself is shielded by immunity.
This is not merely corruption. This is the systematic dismantling of the accountability infrastructure of the Philippine state. Under the Rule of Law, each institution checks the others: the legislature investigates the executive, the judiciary interprets the law independently, the Ombudsman prosecutes corrupt officials, and the press informs the public. When every link in this chain is compromised, the system does not simply weaken-it inverts. The institutions designed to prevent plunder become the instruments that enable it. The law does not constrain power; power constrains the law.
Whether the Marines’ specific claims are ultimately verified in their totality is, in one sense, secondary to the systemic point. The response to the allegations—the Palace’s dismissal, the media’s silence, the military’s focus on discrediting witnesses rather than investigating claims, Congress’s pre-judgment—tells us everything about the state of the Rule of Law. In a functioning system, sworn allegations of this magnitude would trigger an independent investigation, protective custody for witnesses, subpoenas for evidence, and wall-to-wall media coverage. That none of this happened is itself the indictment.
This is the environment in which the “bending the law” philosophy operates. It is not an isolated remark. It is symptomatic of a governance culture where law is viewed not as a constraint on power but as a resource to be deployed, bent, or ignored depending on political needs.
If the maleta scandal represents the alleged plundering of the national treasury under the cover of institutional capture, the surrender of former President Rodrigo Roa Duterte to the International Criminal Court represents something arguably more dangerous: the wholesale abandonment of constitutional principles by the very administration sworn to uphold them—not through negligence, but through calculated political maneuvering disguised as compliance with international obligation.
The facts must be laid out precisely, because precision is what the Rule of Law demands. The Philippines ratified the Rome Statute on August 30, 2011, and it entered into force on November 1, 2011. On March 14, 2018, President Duterte ordered the Philippines’ withdrawal from the Rome Statute after the ICC launched a preliminary examination into the drug war. The withdrawal became effective on March 17, 2019. The Philippines is, as a matter of international law, no longer a State Party to the Rome Statute. This is not disputed by anyone, including the ICC itself.
President Marcos Jr., from the very beginning of his administration in 2022, repeatedly and unequivocally declared that the Philippines would not cooperate with the ICC. In July 2023, he categorically stated that the Philippines “will not cooperate” with the ICC “in any way, shape, or form.” In early 2024, he was quoted saying: “Let me say this for the 100th time. I do not recognise the jurisdiction of ICC in the Philippines. The Philippine government will not lift a finger to help any investigation that the ICC conducts.” He repeated this position in Germany in March 2024 and to foreign correspondents in Manila in April 2024. He called the ICC “a threat to our sovereignty” and described its proceedings as an “intrusion into our internal matters.”
Then the Marcos-Duterte alliance collapsed. Vice President Sara Duterte’s feud with the Marcos camp escalated throughout 2024, culminating in her November statement that she had instructed someone to assassinate the President, his wife, and the House Speaker should anything happen to her—a threat she justified by claiming that the Marcos camp was itself plotting her assassination. The political calculation changed. On March 11, 2025, former President Duterte was arrested at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport upon arrival from Hong Kong. By 11:03 PM that same night, a specially chartered plane carrying Duterte was airborne to The Hague. Marcos held a press conference after the plane departed, explaining that the arrest was made “in compliance with our commitments to Interpol.”
The legal sleight of hand must be understood: Marcos framed the surrender not as cooperation with the ICC—which he had sworn never to do—but as compliance with Interpol, which the Philippines remains a member of. “We did not do this because it came from the ICC,” the administration insisted. “We did this because Interpol asked us to do it.” This is a distinction without a difference. The Interpol Red Notice existed because of the ICC warrant. The arrest was made pursuant to the ICC warrant. The destination was the ICC Detention Centre at Scheveningen. To claim compliance with Interpol while denying cooperation with the ICC is to “bend the law” so far that it snaps.
The surrender of Duterte to the ICC raises fundamental constitutional questions that the Marcos administration has refused to address. Duterte himself, in a letter to the ICC dated February 17, 2026, stated: “I am a Filipino citizen forcibly pushed into a jet and renditioned to The Hague in the Netherlands in flagrant contravention of my country’s Constitution and of national sovereignty.” His lawyer, Salvador Medialdea, protested to the ICC’s presiding judge that the transfer was an act of “extrajudicial rendition”—or, as he put it for non-lawyers, “pure and simple kidnapping.”
Regardless of one’s views on Duterte’s guilt or innocence, the constitutional issues are serious and cannot be dismissed by the magnitude of the charges against him. The Bill of Rights (Article III of the 1987 Constitution) guarantees every Filipino citizen certain non-derogable protections:
Section 1: Due Process. No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Was due process observed when a former President was arrested at an airport and placed on a chartered jet to a foreign tribunal within hours, with no prior judicial review by Philippine courts?
Section 2: Right Against Unreasonable Seizures. The right of the people to be secure in their persons against unreasonable seizures shall not be violated, and no warrant of arrest shall issue except upon probable cause determined personally by a judge. The arrest warrant was issued by the ICC—a body whose jurisdiction the Philippines itself has formally repudiated. No Philippine court reviewed, domesticated, or affirmed the warrant.
Section 16: Right to Speedy Disposition and Trial. Duterte was removed from the jurisdiction of Philippine courts—courts that, whatever their imperfections, are constitutionally mandated to adjudicate cases involving Filipino citizens on Philippine soil—and delivered to a foreign tribunal without the benefit of any extradition proceeding.
This last point is critical. The Philippines has an existing legal framework for international cooperation in criminal matters. We have extradition treaties with multiple countries. We have Republic Act No. 9851 (the Philippine Act on Crimes Against International Humanitarian Law, Genocide, and Other Crimes Against Humanity), which provides mechanisms for cooperation, including the surrender of accused persons to international courts. None of these mechanisms were invoked. There was no extradition hearing. No Philippine court evaluated the warrant. No judicial officer weighed the constitutional rights of the accused against the obligation to international justice. The former President of the Republic was arrested and shipped to The Hague in a matter of hours—a process that, under normal extradition procedures, would take months or years of judicial review.
The Rome Statute itself operates on the principle of complementarity: the ICC is meant to be a court of last resort, exercising jurisdiction only when national courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute. Marcos himself had repeatedly asserted that the Philippines has a “good justice system” and “working courts”—this was, in fact, his stated reason for refusing to cooperate with the ICC in the first place.
The contradiction is devastating. If the Philippine judiciary is functional—as Marcos claimed for three years—then Duterte should have been tried in Philippine courts. If the Philippine judiciary is not functional—which the surrender to the ICC implies—then Marcos spent three years lying to the Filipino people about the state of their own justice system. Either way, the administration’s position is intellectually bankrupt. You cannot simultaneously claim that your courts work and hand your citizens over to a foreign tribunal because your courts can’t be trusted to do the job.
The Philippine Congress had, in fact, begun investigating the drug war killings in August 2024. The House Committee conducted hearings in which explosive testimony was given, including revelations that senior officials ordered the “elimination” of drug suspects and that Duterte himself admitted to having a “death squad” in Davao and “encouraging” police killings as president. A Department of Justice task force was created in November 2024 to investigate drug war killings. The domestic accountability process was underway. It was imperfect, it was politically motivated in part, but it was functioning. To bypass it entirely and surrender a citizen to a foreign tribunal is to declare that your own institutions are incapable—while simultaneously running those institutions.
Perhaps the most fundamental legal question is this: does the Philippines’ withdrawal from the Rome Statute mean anything at all? The withdrawal, which became effective on March 17, 2019, was an act of Philippine sovereignty, exercised through the constitutional processes of the state. The ICC maintains that it retains jurisdiction over crimes committed while the Philippines was a State Party (November 2011 to March 2019). This is a contested legal position—Duterte’s defense team has appealed the jurisdiction question, and the matter remains pending before the ICC Appeals Chamber.
But the Philippine government’s position should have been clear: we withdrew, we do not recognize your jurisdiction, and we will not cooperate. That was, for three years, the position of the Marcos administration. The fact that it was abandoned overnight—not because of a change in legal reasoning, not because of new evidence, not because of a judicial determination, but because of a political feud between two families—reveals that the “sovereignty” argument was never about sovereignty at all. It was a political instrument, deployed when useful and discarded when inconvenient. This is the very definition of Rule by Law.
The Duterte rendition moves the analysis beyond “bending the law.” This is not a case of adding extra-legal requirements to the Witness Protection Program or using moral suasion to supplement statutory provisions. This is the breaking of the most fundamental guarantees in the Philippine Constitution—the Bill of Rights—against a political adversary, using the machinery of international justice as a weapon of domestic political warfare.
And here is the point that must be stated with absolute clarity: the constitutional rights in the Bill of Rights do not exist only for the innocent. They exist for everyone—including the guilty, the accused, the despised, and the politically inconvenient. A Bill of Rights that protects only popular citizens is not a Bill of Rights at all; it is a privilege card, revocable at the discretion of whoever holds power. If the constitutional rights of a former President can be set aside because the current President finds it politically expedient, then no Filipino’s rights are safe. The precedent is set: when the sovereign decides that the law must yield to political necessity, the Bill of Rights yields.
Duterte himself may deserve to face justice for the drug war killings. But accountability through legitimate legal process is not the same as accountability through extrajudicial rendition. The former strengthens the Rule of Law; the latter destroys it. And when the same administration that renders one citizen to a foreign tribunal without due process also dismisses ₱805 billion in corruption allegations as a “lousy script,” the message is unmistakable: the law is not a neutral framework for justice. It is a weapon. It protects friends and destroys enemies. This is the Rule of Men, fully realized.
If the institutions tasked with upholding the law are compromised—if the Department of Justice affirms that the law can be bent, if the Ombudsman’s office is led by the very person who made that affirmation, if political dynasties control the legislature, if the media refuses to report sworn allegations against the President, and if the Executive resists international accountability mechanisms—then where does the ordinary Filipino turn?
This is where artificial intelligence, specifically legal AI, enters not as a futuristic abstraction but as a present-tense necessity.
One of the most insidious tools of the Rule by Law is selective application. Laws are enforced against some and not others. Precedents are cited when convenient and ignored when inconvenient. The public, lacking legal training and access, is unable to verify whether the government is following its own rules.
Legal AI systems—like LEAi, which provides access to Philippine jurisprudence, statutes, and legal doctrines—serve as an institutional memory that cannot be selectively erased. When a public official claims that requiring restitution before WPP admission is “morally right,” any citizen with access to a legal AI can verify in minutes that Republic Act No. 6981 (The Witness Protection, Security, and Benefit Act) contains no such requirement. The law speaks for itself; AI merely ensures the people can hear it.
The Rule by Law thrives on information asymmetry. Those in power know the law; ordinary citizens do not. This asymmetry allows officials to “bend” the law with impunity because the public lacks the tools to recognize when bending becomes breaking.
AI-powered legal research platforms collapse this asymmetry. An Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) facing illegal recruitment can access relevant provisions of the Migrant Workers Act. A barangay resident displaced by a government project can verify whether proper expropriation procedures were followed. A student can check whether a local ordinance violates the Constitution. When legal knowledge is democratized, the capacity to hold power accountable is distributed across the entire citizenry—not concentrated in the hands of those who can afford expensive lawyers.
The Marines scandal illustrates precisely why AI-powered forensic tools are no longer optional. Baligod himself pointed out that the allegations are specific enough to be tested: hotel logs, CCTV footage, flight manifests, vehicle plate numbers, telecommunications metadata, and bank foreign-exchange records could all corroborate or disprove the claims. Legal AI systems capable of cross-referencing millions of government procurement records, COA audit reports, DPWH project listings, and banking data could detect the statistical anomalies—bid patterns suggesting collusion, cost overruns exceeding reasonable thresholds, geographic concentration of contracts among connected firms—that human investigators would need years to trace.
Consider that if an AI system had been deployed to analyze the flood control budget from 2022 to 2025 in real time, the discrepancy between appropriations and actual project delivery could have been flagged within months rather than years. The “ghost projects” and inflated contracts that the Discaya couple testified about—involving a “standard” 25 percent kickback on DPWH contracts—would have shown up as statistical outliers in any competent data analysis. Billions might have been saved. Lives lost to flooding in substandard infrastructure might have been preserved.
More broadly, lega AI can track whether judicial decisions are consistent with precedent, whether executive orders align with statutory authority, and whether legislative actions comport with constitutional requirements. It cannot replace human judgment, but it can make the raw material of accountability accessible at a scale that was previously impossible.
The media’s abdication in the Marines scandal reveals a gap in the democratic ecosystem that AI can partially fill. When the broadsheets refuse to publish, when television news buries the story, citizens need alternative mechanisms for accessing, verifying, and understanding public information. AI-powered platforms can serve as always-available fact-checkers: verifying legal claims made by public officials, cross-referencing public statements with the actual text of statutes and jurisprudence, and providing citizens with the contextual knowledge needed to evaluate competing narratives.
This is not to say AI should replace journalism. But when journalism fails—when the institutions meant to inform the public choose to protect the powerful instead—AI-powered legal research becomes a critical backstop. It is, in effect, a digital Fifth Estate: not reporting the news, but empowering every citizen to interrogate the news (and the non-news) for themselves.
It is critical to emphasize that AI’s role in maintaining the rule of law is as a thinking partner—not as a replacement for human institutions, legal professionals, or democratic processes. AI cannot pass laws, render judgments, or hold officials in contempt. What it can do is ensure that the information necessary for accountability is available, accessible, and accurate.
In a functioning democracy with strong institutions, AI would be a useful efficiency tool. In a democracy under stress—where the rule of law is being bent by the very officials sworn to uphold it, where the media has been co-opted, and where ₱805 billion in alleged kickbacks can be dismissed with a quip about “lousy scripts”—AI becomes something more fundamental: it becomes a bulwark against the monopolization of legal knowledge by power.
From a philosophical standpoint, the notion that law can be “bent to please the people” conflates two fundamentally different sources of legitimacy: popular will and legal authority. Democratic governance requires both, but they are not interchangeable.
Popular will is expressed through elections, through the legislative process, and through the constitutional amendment procedures outlined in Article XVII. It is channeled through institutions. The law is the crystallization of popular will—passed by elected representatives, signed by an elected president, and interpreted by a judiciary appointed through constitutionally prescribed mechanisms.
To “bend” the law to “please the people” is to substitute the proper channels of democratic expression with the ad hoc judgment of whoever happens to hold power at the moment. It is a short-circuit of democracy dressed up as populism. And it is dangerous precisely because it sounds reasonable. Who would argue against pleasing the people?
But as the legal philosopher Lon Fuller argued in The Morality of Law, the internal morality of law depends on its generality, its publicity, its prospectivity, its clarity, its consistency, its feasibility, its stability, and the congruence between official action and declared rule. Every time the law is “bent,” one or more of these requirements is violated. Bend it enough times, and you no longer have a legal system—you have a system of personal rule wearing a legal costume.
If we accept that the Rule of Law in the Philippines is under significant stress, and that AI has a legitimate role in reinforcing accountability, then we can begin to articulate a framework for what an AI-augmented rule of law might look like:
1. Universal Access to Legal Knowledge. Every Filipino should have access to the full corpus of Philippine jurisprudence, statutes, and legal doctrines—not just those who can afford legal counsel. AI-powered platforms make this possible at a fraction of the cost of traditional legal research. This is not a luxury; in a democracy, it is an infrastructure requirement as basic as roads or electricity.
2. Real-Time Legal Accountability. AI systems should be deployed to monitor government actions against legal requirements in real time. When an executive order is issued, AI can analyze whether it falls within the President’s statutory and constitutional authority. When a procurement contract is awarded, AI can flag irregularities. When a public official makes a legal claim, AI can verify it against the actual text of the law.
3. Evidence-Based Anti-Corruption Forensics. AI can analyze patterns across millions of government transactions to identify corruption networks, ghost projects, and anomalous spending patterns. The flood control scandal demonstrated that billions can be siphoned over years without detection. AI-powered forensic analysis could compress the detection timeline from years to months or even weeks.
4. Legal Education at Scale. AI can serve as a thinking partner for law students, legal aid clinics, and public interest lawyers. In a country with thousands of islands and limited access to legal education outside Metro Manila, AI-powered legal research tools can extend the reach of legal expertise to every municipality in the archipelago.
5. Citizen Empowerment and the Digital Fifth Estate. When citizens understand their rights and can verify government claims against actual law—and when the mainstream media abdicates its watchdog function—AI-powered platforms become essential infrastructure for informed citizenship. They ensure that no government, no matter how powerful, can monopolize the truth.
The Philippines stands at an inflection point. The flood control scandal, the “bend the law” exchange, the appointment of Remulla as Ombudsman, the Marines’ ₱805 billion maleta allegations, the extrajudicial rendition of a former President to a foreign tribunal in violation of the Bill of Rights, the media’s capitulation, the persistence of political dynasties, and the selective deployment of both domestic and international legal mechanisms as instruments of political warfare—these are not isolated incidents. They are data points in a trend toward the normalization of arbitrary governance.
The 1987 Constitution was written by people who had lived through dictatorship. They understood that the Rule of Law is not a natural state—it is a construction that must be actively maintained, defended, and reinforced. Every generation must make its own case for why the law should govern, rather than men.
In our generation, artificial intelligence offers a powerful new tool in this perennial struggle. Not as a replacement for human judgment, democratic participation, or institutional reform—but as an amplifier of transparency, an equalizer of access, and a guardian of the legal knowledge that belongs to every Filipino.
Atty. Baligod was right when he told the Filipino people: “Wala po tayong ibang maaasahan ngayon na maglalabas ng katotohanan kundi tayong mga mamamayan din.” We cannot rely on anyone else to reveal the truth except ourselves. But to reveal the truth, we must first have the tools to find it, understand it, and share it. Legal AI is that tool.
The law must not bend. Not for the powerful, not for the popular, not for the politically expedient. And it must not break—not even against those we despise, not even in the name of justice, not even when the political calculus makes it convenient. Dura lex sed lex. The law is harsh, but it is the law. And in a republic worthy of the name, it is the law that rules—not men, not money, not suitcases full of cash, not chartered jets to The Hague, and not the deafening silence of a press that has forgotten what it was for.
If we cannot yet perfect our institutions, let us at least ensure that every Filipino has the knowledge to hold them accountable. That is the promise of legal AI. That is the work that remains.
About the Author
Atty. Dexter Feliciano is a distinguished lawyer and entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Thinc Office Corp., and creator of the legal research platform MyLegalWhiz.
𝕏Atty. Dexter Feliciano is a distinguished lawyer and entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Thinc Office Corp., and creator of the legal research platform MyLegalWhiz.
𝕏Mylegalwhiz gives every lawyer, law student, business owner, and Filipino access to a legal research tool
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