Websites that provide free access to statutes and court decisions help the common man
As our world gets more complex, so do our statutes. We now have laws for everything from the preservation of wild elephants (1879; seriously) to the running of cybercafes. This statutory morass is confusing and intimidating, and the citizen is more often victim than intended beneficiary. This is a situation that breeds corruption and administrative oppression; few, for instance, know precisely what their rights are whether it is a traffic offence or applying for a factory license.
The problem is exacerbated by the lack of adequate public access to the law itself. Till fairly recently, it wasn’t even possible to find court decisions or statutes. You had to consult a lawyer. The decision by the Law Ministry and the higher judiciary to open up access to laws and judgements for the first time allowed the common man free access to the law. At least in theory; in practice, it was another story. The official Indian government statutes website provides the full text of central government acts. For local laws, you must look elsewhere; and the site isn’t terribly user-friendly in the first place. The central caselaw database, is entirely separate, unlinked to the statutes and has no search across all courts, and each court has its own peculiar search features.
Others are trying to address this, in different ways. The Bombay High Court’s official website’s best-kept secret is the mysteriously named “e-library”. It’s the sixth link from the top on the left, and it’s one that few use or even know about. At least part of the reason is the terrible design of the entire website — a mess of odd colours, awful graphics and layout, little flashing “new” icons, no typography to speak of and the proliferation of ugly buttons (yes, actually buttons, the kind with little icons of a house on them for ‘home’). Even lawyers use the site only for limited purposes — checking the daily lists, tracking the status of their cases or downloading orders.
This is a shame, because once you dig past the design, the e-library, which opens on a different page with even more virulent colours, is both helpful and rewarding. There is a long list of statutes both central and local. There are the all-important rules under various acts. And there are links to caselaw from India and overseas, texts of historical cases, online legal journals and databases, lecture series, newspaper and magazine links. And then there’s a section called e-books. This has links to some delights. I found a link to Arthur Quiller-Couch’s lectures On the Art of Reading and On the Art of Writing and there are other links to the collected works of Shakespeare, essays by Orwell, poems by Yeats and more.
Not so much a repository — it doesn’t actually hold the material itself — as an intelligent and thoughtful aggregation of harvested links, the e-library is the work of Uma Narayan, the High Court’s Chief Librarian. Soft-spoken and self-effacing almost to a fault, Ms Narayan is visibly embarrassed when, at a chance meeting in the High Court, I compliment her work. “There is so much yet to be done,” she tells me. “We must start including government notifications and gazettes because people can’t find these very easily and they are important.”
Indeed they are (try finding online the text of the recent notification raising the age-limit on serving alcohol for example) and Ms Narayan’s approach, with the active support and encouragement of several High Court judges, is a step in the right direction. This is information to which the public must have access without having to burrow into the bowels of some musty government department, and it must be available quickly.
Halfway across the world, Dr Sushant Sinha, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan, has done something even more remarkable. In January 2008, he launched indiankanoon and in less than three years it has grown to include caselaw from across the country (the Supreme Court, 24 high courts, 17 tribunals), parliamentary debates (25,000 and counting), the Constituent Assembly Debates, law commission reports, and more. The caselaw goes back to the 1800’s. His software ‘scrapes’ the various publicly accessible websites of Indian courts and actually collates the material. There are cross-references to earlier cases, notes of later cases which refer to the one being viewed, links to the statutes in question and notations of the official law journal citations. It uses a familiar Google-style search interface, which you can refine with an advanced search. The site is clean, almost bare: no advertising, no images, no mass of text. Just the search box and then the results. It’s not perfect and the formatting sometimes goes off but this, as Dr Sinha explained in an email last year, has more to do with the way court computer departments format the source documents. Unlike other free-access services (India Legal Information Institute, and Legal Information Institute of India), Indiankanoon has top-end search facilities and by far the most comprehensive base material.
And it is entirely free.
Why would Sushant Sinha bother? And what does indiankanoon actually do? Legal empowerment in a statute is one thing; awareness of it is another; and the lack of awareness drives the common man, as Dr Sinha says, away from courts instead of to them. Ignorance of the law may be no excuse, but it certainly breeds fear and corruption.
Dr Sinha realized that keeping laws and judgements in separate databases creates an gap in legal awareness, especially when the interpretation of a convoluted, linguistically opaque, statute comes from a court’s decision. Indiankanoon attempts to overcome this. It integrates court decisions with cross-references to the statutes in question and tries to make the law intelligible.
It may not have the thunder of the Lokpal bill, but this notion of making the law accessible is a revolution in its own quiet way. Information is power, and public information is power to the people.
As our world gets more complex, so do our statutes. We now have laws for everything from the preservation of wild elephants (1879; seriously) to the running of cybercafes. This statutory morass is confusing and intimidating, and the citizen is more often victim than intended beneficiary. This is a situation that breeds corruption and administrative oppression; few, for instance, know precisely what their rights are whether it is a traffic offence or applying for a factory license.
