Researching on Indian law

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How does one usually proceed with obtaining information as a legal researcher?

The traditional approach involves searching on proprietary databases after brushing up on our knowledge via textbooks or other print resources.

In case the traditional approach is unavailable or lacking due to some reason, one may opt for free resources online. Here is where we can capitalise on our knowledge of data made available by various government and private institutions when reading about Indian law.

As a researcher, you have to look for notifications across the ecosystem of Indian Government websites for getting the scanned copy of the notification, or for utilisation as a trustable source of information regarding a legal practice.

List of free government databases for lawyers

• e-SCR - This is a free searchable databasae of judgments of the Honourable Supreme Court and High Court made available online. It supports searching by text, and there is a demo on YouTube.
  “Supreme Court Reports”, is an official report under the Indian Law Reports Act of 1875, the database contains summarisation of immense value, since these headnotes are approved by the Honourable Supreme Court of India. It is also building a multilingual translation feature.

• IndiaCode - This is a database of Indian statutes, rules and regulations. Pertinently, it has features to browse all enactments (including State enactments) and also displays repealed enactments. This is useful for those lawyers who happen to require older versions of laws applicable to their regimes. Sometimes it may not reflect the updated list of rules and regulations.

• Ministry websites - Here, there are various sections which list the rules and regulations, in PDF, searchable database form (e.g., Income Tax Department, and sometimes even e-book form (e.g., Ministry of Corporate Affairs).
  You may use the “sitemap” (usually located at the footer of the website) to locate links to acts/rules/notifications, etc. Some keywords and places to look for within the ministry websites are,
  • “What’s New” section - this contains all the circulars notified date-wise in many instances.
  • “Archive” - it usually occurs at the end of the webpage when browsing through notifications/acts/rules/orders and can contain the content which is older than a specific date
  • “Links to other websites/Portals” - Sometimes, a ministry or governmental department opens a portal for a specific purpose. For e.g., the Parivesh portal deals specifically with Environment, Forest, Wildlife, and CRZ Clearances, and is hence linked on the website of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change.
  • “Resources” - often times, it contains ministry publications that can contain crucial information pertaining to the activities and handbooks on the relevant areas of law.
• High Court e-libraries and e-databases - These vast reserves of data online deserve their special mention, providing an accessible trove of legal resources, such as,
  • Bombay High Court Judges’ library This portal has a list of several Central and State enactments, gazette notifications and list of gazetteers from various Indian states. It also has a collection of scholarly publications by judges of the Honourable Bombay High Court, along with some pages on legal history. It also has a list of free resources available.
  • Delhi High Court’s resources - The Honourable Delhi High Court has a helpful list of resources, that include open source e-books, journals, and speeches by judges of the Honourable Delhi High Court. Do note that in most cases this is not searchable and one has to browse through the list of resources.
• Resources provided by Judicial Academies Formed with the intention of training judicial officers and conducting research, the websites for these academies often host high quality content.
  • Judicial Training & Research Institute, Uttar Pradesh - Contains consolidated digests, as well as articles published in its in-house journal, and some digitised books by reputed authors as well as e-books on practical issues such as the Handbook on Arbitration Law by Justice S.U. Khan.
  • West Bengal Judicial Academy - Useful judgments of the Supreme Court are listed here, categorised by their field of law and with the headnote.
  • Maharashtra Judicial Academy - Contains the caselaws of particular cases categorised by the headnote. Also, there are numerous workshops conducted for judges, whose knowledge bases have been covered in the blog section.
  • For a list of all state judicial academies, see the linked webpage curated by the National Judicial Academy.
• “Ecourts” - This is the portal for various courts including many High Courts, District Courts, Family Courts, Labour Courts, and other courts in various states in India. Hence, you will find links to court orders as well as relevant notifications. However, one must not discount this source as it can host or link directly to relevant local laws. Some examples I found helpful of resources available on the ecourts portal are as follows
  • The Civil Manual and Criminal Manual issued by the Bombay High Court is made available on the Mumbai City Civil Courts’ website.
  • Proforma of various litigation forms/applications is made available on the website of Central District Court, Delhi
• Websites of Indian universities/Databases maintained by Indian Universities
  • e-Gyan Kosh - It is a copyrighted implementation of Dspace with course content by the Open and Distance Learning institutions in the country. The Self Learning Material provided by IGNOU covers many departments/fields of study, including, Law but this is also a good place to observe interdisciplinarity in the study of law, such as by looking for, and accessing resources that fall within legal studies, but are categorised under Commerce, Business, Mental Health, and Labour Laws.
  • The National Digital Library - One of the flagship measures taken by IIT Kharagpur to digitise records from different departments but it is currently lacking comprehensive coverage on law.
  • Shodhganga - This is a collection of dissertations and theses from participating Indian universities which provides keyword and category-wise search.
  • SwayamPrabha - This is a set of DTH channels maintained by the INFLIB Centre. Channel 6 linked here has content on Indian laws, and is focussed on forensic investigation and criminal laws.
  • e-PG-Pathshala - A set of resources maintained by Ministry of Human Resource Development, where you can browse by subject, including law.

List of free legal databases operated by non-governmental entities

• Legal Information Institute of India - An initiative of the Free Access to Law Movement run in collaboration with Prof. Ranbir Singh, Prof. V.C. Vivekanandan and some Indian Universities. It provides a catalog of recent and important judgments, some databases on state and central laws, and also peer-reviewed journals.

• IndianKanoon - Hardly needs an introduction. Also has a premium subscription model if one wishes to avail the full set of features. However, one is limited when viewing a search result that returns more than 40 pages, at least on the free version.

• Open Access Journals/Journals with free texts These valuable sources of multidisciplinary and even legal scholarly content in peer-reviewed journals, sometimes available in the public domain or a “copyleft” license are useful for legal and non-legal research both. Some popular indexes are:-
  • Law Review Commons - This is the largest index of open access journals in the field of law, with a majority of English language and American journals.
  • Database of Open Access Journals - As of the date of my writing, there are 537 Law journals in English indexed here. This supports keyword search and can be used for sharpening your legal awareness with new trends.
  • The Electronic Journals Library - This index provides a resource of “freely available texts” when filtered through with the option named as such. You can also similarly filter on Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar.
  • While not “popular” per se, some governmental institutes also post a compendium of links to Open Access Databases in the law category. For example, Delhi Judicial Academy provides international resources, and NALSAR, Hyderabad provides a list of resources from a variety of jurisdictions.
• In general, DSpace, provides an open source package for digital materials, and is used often by universities across the world. You can browse the list of implementations on their registry.

But how must one make the process of grasping concepts of a relatively new law more effecient?

Firstly, there are various tools available for saving databases/websites/portals or links obtained from it, for example

• Where possible, you can download the RSS feed and view it in a Feed Reader.
• You can save all of them as bookmarks.
• You can index the same in Excel, CSV, or any convenient format for yourself.
• You can also use an app that stores your web links such as Pocket or Raindrop.

Furthermore, in conducting legal research, the traditional approach would involve consulting a textbook or sifting through results from an online subscription service.-However, I will take some popular use-cases and demonstrate how to conduct research on those sample problems using only free databases in the sequel to this article.

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