04/02/2020 E-Library - Information At Your Fingertips: Printer Friendly advances the following arguments: The Sovereign, which is the source of all rights including ownership, has the power to restructure the consolidation of rights inherent in ownership in the State. Through the mandate of the Constitutions that have been adopted, the State has wrested control of those portions of the natural resources it deems absolutely necessary for social welfare and existence. It has been held that the State may impair vested rights through a legitimate exercise of police power. Vested rights do not prohibit the Sovereign from performing acts not only essential to but determinative of social welfare and existence. To allow otherwise is to invite havoc in the established social system. x x x Time-immemorial possession does not create private ownership in cases of natural resources that have been found from generation to generation to be critical to the survival of the Sovereign and its agent, the State.[98] Stated simply, the Solicitor General's argument is that the State, as the source of all titles to land, had the power to re-vest in itself, through the 1935 Constitution, title to all lands, including ancestral lands and ancestral domains. While the Solicitor General admits that such a theory would necessarily impair vested rights, he reasons out that even vested rights of ownership over ancestral lands and ancestral domains are not absolute and may be impaired by the legitimate exercise of police power. I cannot agree. The text of the provision of the 1935 Constitution invoked by the Solicitor General, while embodying the theory of jura regalia, is too clear for any misunderstanding. It simply declares that "all agricultural, timber, and mineral lands of the public domain, waters, minerals, coal, petroleum, and other mineral oils, all forces of potential energy, and other natural resources of the Philippines belong to the State."[99] Nowhere does it state that certain lands which are "absolutely necessary for social welfare and existence," including those which are not part of the public domain, shall thereafter be owned by the State. If there is any room for constitutional construction, the provision should be interpreted in favor of the preservation, rather than impairment or extinguishment, of vested rights. Stated otherwise, Section 1, Article XII of the 1935 Constitution cannot be construed to mean that vested right which had existed then were extinguished and that the landowners were divested of their lands, all in the guise of "wrest[ing] control of those portions of the natural resources [which the State] deems absolutely necessary for social welfare and existence." On the contrary, said Section restated the fundamental rule against the diminution of existing rights by expressly providing that the ownership of lands of the public domain and other natural resources by the State is "subject to any existing right, grant, lease, or concessions." The "existing rights" that were intended to be protected must, perforce, include the right of ownership by indigenous peoples over their ancestral lands and domains. The [100] words of the law should be given their ordinary or usual meaning, "existing rights" cannot be assigned an unduly restrictive definition. and the term Petitioners concede that Congress is mandated under Section 5, Article XII of the elibrary.judiciary.gov.ph/thebookshelf/showdocsfriendly/1/36882 91/148