Daily Serving of Legal Matters

This image is taken from google.com. I remember when I was in grade school, I would write something on the front page of my notebooks saying "Real Property of Urbano T. Mante, Jr." to have a sort of a mark that those notebooks were mine.  Sometimes my classmate would ask me to change it to "Personal Property" because those notebooks were personally owned by me.  So, I would sometimes interchange Real to Personal Property. However in law school, I learned that real and personal property are two different things. The Civil Code of the Philippines, particularly Articles 414-418, discusses the differences between real and personal property. Real property is also known as IMMOVABLE property while personal property is called as MOVABLE property. As the names suggest, immovable property is basically stationary and cannot be moved or transferred to another place.  On the other hand, movable property refers to the property that can be moved with ease. ...

What is involved in the crime of theft? As provided in the Revised Penal Code, it is only personal property that is involved in the crime of theft.  Otherwise, the crime would not be theft. Personal Property refers to the property that is basically movable.  Meaning this is the property that can be carried with ease by the owner.  For instance, cellphone, appliances, money, and the likes. However, with the internet age we are in today, what is commonly stolen is the identity of a person.  Identity thieves are swarming in the cyberspace with the purpose to deceive somebody inorder to exact some money or to bash some persons inorder to conceal the real identity of the culprit. A lot of victims have already asked whether they could file this so-called identity theft case.  However, considering that we did not have yet, at that moment, any specific law defining and punishing such crime, the victims would just get frustrated. Fortunately, with t...

When these terms Robbery and Theft are translated in Filipino, they both known as "PAGNANAKAW" or "PANGAWAT" in Cebuano dialect.  They mean the same thing, so to speak, in layman's point of view. However, it is important to know the distinction between Robbery and Theft.  They may mean the same thing but they entail different implication.   Let us discuss first the commonalities of the two terms.