Justice Altamas Kabir, who will be the Chief Justice of India next month, recently said when he was in the Calcutta High Court, it was very difficult to get a particular record. “It was even more difficult to find a person who can find the record.” If a judge like him is stumped by lack of access to information, the plight of litigants and other consumers of justice can well be imagined
The cyber revolution has reached the legal field, but just so. The judiciary is a conservative institution and it does not accept new technology easily. It is more comfortable among the dusty stacks of files taking half the space of the corridors, as in the Supreme Court. Therefore, computerisation is progressing at a snail’s pace, though funds (Rs 854 crore in five years) are available.
As a result, a litigant, student or anyone interested in reading judgments will find it difficult to trace them, especially in the high courts and tribunals. They have websites, of course, but they are useful mainly to lawyers and less to the general public. Many of them have not made any worthwhile innovation in the last two decades.
Most websites of high courts have archaic formats. Unless you know the number of the case or the name of the judge who wrote the judgment, you may not be able to trace a judgment of public importance. It is as if only the litigant, his lawyer and the judge are interested in the law declared by the court.
In recent times, the interest of the common people in the legal field has increased tremendously. For instance, everyone at the Team Anna rally was ready with a few tips for law-makers. Every social and economic issue has a legal dimension these days. Add to this the increasing interference of courts in all aspects of life.
Though the Supreme Court website is adequate and that of the Bombay High Court a delight, the pages of some high courts like that of Madras, Calcutta, Orissa, Chhattisgarh or Gauhati are not helpful to ordinary visitors. The tribunals are little better. The Intellectual Property Appellate Board site, for instance, follows a peculiar chronology, with several gaps. If other high courts and tribunals followed the Supreme Court pattern, they would have been more helpful.
The National Informatics Centre (NIC), which designed all the legal websites, has done it differently for each court and tribunal. There is no common design, nor coordination. There is an e-committee headed by the Chief Justice, but there has been no perceptible improvement for considerable time.
Whatever progress achieved was owing to the initiative of some computer-savvy judges in some courts, and not thanks to the initiative of the committee or NIC. The techies merely implement the directions of the judges, who are mostly purblind groping in the cyber-world.
The fast pace of information technology should wake up judges and those who purvey legal knowledge. Six decades ago, a British judge-turned novelist wrote about computer replacing judges. Though it was a piece of humour then, it is no joke now. The Yale Law Journal published an essay recently titled “Judges in jeopardy”, describing a computer game called Watson.
“Could Watson perform better than judges at the tasks of statutory interpretation?” the editor asked in her article, and stated that “each of the three elements of new textual interpretation-premise, process, and reasoning-point toward the possibility of Watson outperforming new textualist judges at their own game.” She says computers are notoriously better than humans at “recalling” factual knowledge.
Lawyers should not smirk at this prospect. A British journal last month carried an article titled, “Will computer replace your lawyer?” It warned that the computer might do to lawyers what it did to skilled workers in the automobile industry and other sectors of the global economy.
The inadequacy of human faculties can be discerned from just one area of law. In road accidents, tribunals and courts are following a schedule in the Motor Vehicles Act to calculate compensation. The formula given in the chart has been ridiculed by the Supreme Court as unworkable and bad arithmetic. So much for the draftsmen. On the judicial side, computation of damages has been so idiosyncratic that poor victims get low amounts and the rich ones get more on each appeal. Recently, the Supreme Court granted Rs 15 lakh to a poor family, while the tribunal awarded only Rs 2.55 lakh. In such cases, it must be said “with utmost respect” (as the lawyers say) that the machine will do sums and impart equity better than judges.
