What does G.R.

in Philippine Case
Citations stand for?
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A friend recently posted this question: “What does G.R. in case numbers mean?”
She was actually referring to Supreme Court case citations. A case citation is basically a way to refer to
past court case decisions. The example in the Wikipedia article is: Fortich v. Corona, G.R. No. 131457, 24
April 1998, 289 SCRA 624.
From the same article, it was pointed out that “G.R. No 131457” is the “case docket number originally
assigned by the Supreme Court… .” The article, however, does not say what G.R. represents.

Although a bit trivial, this was a question I could not leave unanswered.
As used by the Supreme Court, G.R. stands for General Register. My friend had a difficult time googling it,
so I would like to share my references here.
One of my sources is this New York University School of Law journal where G.R. (under the section for The
Philippines) was officially defined as “General Register of advance decisions.”
I also saw General Register used in the Cambridge University Press publication called the Genetic
Suspects: Global Governance of Forensic DNA Profiling and Databasing. Part of the references in Chapter
15: The Philippine Experience is shown below (Screen printed from books.google.com preview. Emphasis
mine.). Instead of the abbreviation G.R., the term General Register was spelled out in the source cases.