Basic acquaintance with law and access to legal information have become indispensable to everyone these days, but no species of knowledge is more difficult to get at the desired moment. It is still a sealed book and patrimony of the legal profession. The courts are the least accessible of all branches of government. The situation has changed little even after computerisation of courts more than a decade ago.
Though the Supreme Court, high courts and tribunals have their own websites, there has been little effort to make them more user-friendly in a decade. On the other side of the globe, the Supreme Court of the Philippines has joined social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter so that the court can swiftly announce its decisions and answer criticism.
Though most websites of the courts are designed and operated by the National Informatics Centre, a government outfit, the quality of the websites varies vastly. The Supreme Court website is easily the most helpful, though it takes a few days to upload the judgments. Orders come even more slowly. The court’s decision can be searched in 11 ways, like the name of the petitioner/respondent, judge’s name, case number, date of the judgment, the statute or the key phrase.
However, the websites of the high courts give very few options. If one wants to read an important judgment of the Madras High Court, for instance, one must know the case number, the judge’s name or the petitioner’s name. This means that only the parties involved or their lawyers can get access to the judgment because only they know the case number and the names of the judges who passed the judgment. The legal profession in general, researchers, law students, faculties, public interest activists and the media are not able to read judgments first hand. Print version of judgments come months later.
The Calcutta High Court also requires you to know the case number, the judges’ names or the date of the judgment if you want to read the decision. Delhi, Gauhati, Rajasthan and Kerala High Courts, among others, also pose this problem. The Karnataka High Court has a hybrid search system with alphabetical order and date, the latter following the American system of year, month and date last.
Then there are some high courts that give choices without clearly defining them. The Allahabad High Court, for instance, has divided the cases into “important decisions that were in headlines”, larger bench decisions, leading/bench cases and judgments from its own publication, Indian Law Reports. The last issue of the print edition came out in summer of 2008.
When you search for high courts in one way, there are 16 of them. But using another way, there are 20. The Sikkim High Court, which has only 89 cases before it, delivers only a few judgments in a year and there is no indication whether they are available on its site.
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The speed with which the judgments are uploaded also leaves much to be desired. A random search on websites of high courts shows that some of them upload judgments and orders very selectively and slowly, while some others provide information excessive information.
If this is the condition of the websites of high courts, one can imagine the state of the websites of subordinate courts and appellate tribunals — more backward and discordant. The Intellectual Property Appellate Board has not uploaded any order this year. In its five years, it seems to have delivered just over 200 orders with large gaps in time. A search for the judgments of the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal turned out to be a wild goose chase. There are three debt recovery tribunals functioning in Tamil Nadu, but none of them has a link for judgments or orders.
There is a committee, headed by a former judge of the Supreme Court, for developing and improving computerisation in courts. It is for this “E-Committee” to look into these aspects and make access to court websites easy and cheap. One of the first steps it should take is to call the registrars of the high courts or the officials dealing with their websites and bring in some uniformity in the search options.