While leafing through Professor Antonio R. Bautista’s Remedial Law Quizzer (2004 ed.), I came across Question No. 252 (at p. 116), which reads as follows: “The sheriff, levying a writ of execution, harvested bangus from the judgment defendant’s fishpond. Is this levy proper?” Without dwelling too much on the question, I answered in my mind…
The prevailing rule and jurisprudence was that an appeal from an arbitral award of the Construction Industry Arbitration Commission (CIAC) was taken by way of a petition for review to the Court of Appeals (CA) pursuant to Section 1, Rule 43 of the Rules of Court which expressly mentions the CIAC among the agencies whose…
In the case of People v. Camenforte, G.R. No. 220916, 14 June 2021,[1] the Supreme Court upheld the dismissal of a criminal case for falsification based on a final judgment in a civil case that the sellers’ signatures in the deeds of sale were genuine. The Supreme Court anchored the dismissal of the criminal case…
This blog post seeks to study the effects of the recently issued A.M. No. 21-06-08-SC (effective 1 August 2021) on Section 2, Rule 126 of the Rules of Criminal Procedure, insofar as the venue of search warrant applications and the extent of enforceability of a search warrant are concerned. Malaloan v. Court of Appeals (1994)…
Definition of an affirmative defense Defenses are set forth by a defendant in his answer to the complaint. They are a potent procedural weapon to defeat or diminish the plaintiff’s claim or claims. Defenses may either be negative or affirmative. A negative defense is the specific denial of the material fact or facts alleged in…
One’s knee-jerk reaction to questions regarding appeals which raise only questions of law is to answer that they should be brought to the Supreme Court by way of a petition for review on certiorari. However, there are a few nuances which the bar reviewee and the law practitioner should take note of. Below is an…
Consider the following situation: The accused was convicted of a crime by the RTC. The accused appealed the judgment to the Court of Appeals by filing a notice of appeal. His appeal raises only questions of law. May the CA dismiss the appeal for being improper? Many will answer in the affirmative, reasoning that the…
The Omnibus Guidelines for the 2020/2021 Bar Examinations provide that “only laws … and canonical doctrines … as of June 30, 2019 are examinable materials.” The Omnibus Guidelines also state that “principles of law are not covered by the cut-off period” and that “any principle of law that appeared in the Court’s decisions after June…
R.A. No. 11576, approved on 30 July 2021, amended B.P. Blg. 129, the law on court jurisdiction, by increasing the jurisdictional amounts in civil cases before the RTCs and the MTCs as follows: For real actions, the jurisdictional amount was increased to an assessed value of ₱400,000. For probate proceedings, the jurisdictional amount was increased…
Summary Prior to the 2004 case of Tenebro v. Court of Appeal, an accused who had contracted two marriages had available to him or her a two-pronged strategy to exculpate himself from criminal liability for bigamy. The first was an attack on the validity of the first or prior marriage. The second was an attack…