What would have been an easy and straightforward implementation of the decision promulgated on January 16, 2001 in G.R. No. 137285 was delayed by the petitioner’s interposition of the issue on the proper reckoning point for computing the just compensation for Lot 1406-B. A reading of the decision in G.R. No. 137285 exposes the interposition as nothing more than an insincere attempt of the petitioner to delay the inevitable performance of its obligation to pay just compensation for Lot 1406-B. Indeed, the Court pronounced there that “the compromise agreement was only about the mode of payment by swapping of lots xxx, only the originally agreed form of compensation that is by [lot[12]] payment, was rescinded.”[13]
That pronouncement became the law of the case, anything to the contrary of which the petitioner could not validly rely upon.The doctrine of the law of the case means that whatever is irrevocably established as the controlling legal rule between the same parties in the same case, whether correct on general principles or not, continues to be the law of the case for as long as the facts on which the legal rule was predicated continue to be the facts of the case before the court.[14] It applies in a situation where an appellate court has made a ruling on a question on appeal and thereafter remands the case to the lower court for further proceedings; the question then settled by the appellate court becomes the law of the case binding the lower court and any subsequent appeal,[15] andquestions necessarily involved and dealt with in a former appeal will be regarded as the law of the case in a subsequent appeal, although the questions are not expressly treated in the opinion of the court, inasmuch as the presumption is that all the facts in the case bearing on the point decided have received due consideration whether all or none of them are mentioned in the opinion.[16]
x x x."
