Aside from man, one of the few mammals that engage in sex for pleasure are dolphins. Dolphins are also one of the few animals aside from man that possess "higher intelligence". Definitely a species worth protecting if not due to their intelligence than because of the appreciation of sex that they share with us as a species.
Sadly, dolphins residing in Tanon Straight, which is a part of the Philippines, are in danger from the oil exploration being undertaken by a certain multinational corporation which was issued a permit in violation of several environmental laws. The cetaceans are subjected to constant torture from the noise and shockwaves caused by round the clock blasting. And Atty Oposa, a great man, has decided to do something about the suffering of dolphins and other marine life.
As a volunteer "paralegal" for Atty Oposa, I volunteered to research laws on animal rights. After a fruitless search in the law library for relevant jurisprudence to champion the plight of my flippered fellow earth beings, i threw my hands in the air and checked out wikipedia.
Binggo! Wikipedia contained a link to another site that had all the arguments and I wondered why there was no such site for Philippine laws? Chan robles online, lawphil and the supreme court website have cases and laws but the sites, even though they are free, by themselves alone are insufficient. Westlaw is a good source of materials but subscription to westlaw costs money.
And the aforementioned mentioned sites don't allow users to add their opinions, comments and trivia to the text of the law itself. The capacity of the users to create pages on wikipedia and edit existing pages to a certain degree has kept the site relevant and interesting.
Star wars fans have wookiepedia in their study of the Force while we Filipino law students have to rely on xerox, printouts and reviewers for our study of the law. If the laws and cases as well as the comments of professors and students were online on a sort of "FILAWpedia" then the study of law would be both more interesting and accessible to Filipinos.
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