Judicial Realization of Just Compensation: A Doctrinal–Institutional Analysis of Agrarian and Right-Of-Way Expropriation in Philippine Law

This study examines the determination of just compensation in Philippine law through a doctrinal–institutional analysis of agrarian reform (CARP) and right-of-way (ROW) expropriation. While doctrine establishes that just compensation is a judicial function grounded in fair market value and the time-of-taking rule, valuation processes vary across legal regimes. Using thirty-six (36) Supreme Court decisions drawn from a larger corpus of approximately 150 cases, the study identifies patterns in valuation practices and institutional design. The findings reveal a stable doctrinal foundation but a pronounced divergence in institutional design, demonstrating that the realization of just compensation is contingent not on legal standards alone but on the mechanisms through which valuation is operationalized. Agrarian reform cases exhibit a predominantly adversarial, party-driven model, whereas right-of-way expropriation relies on commissioner-assisted processes that institutionalize technical expertise—reflected in the universal use of commissioners in expropriation cases (100%) compared to their near absence in agrarian cases (6%). Evaluated against international benchmarks under the Food and Agriculture Organization Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure (VGGT), the results indicate fragmented compliance within a single jurisdiction, with agrarian regimes aligning more closely with substantive valuation requirements and expropriation regimes exhibiting stronger procedural safeguards. These findings suggest that valuation systems do not uniformly internalize international standards but instead distribute compliance across institutional domains.