Before the advent of Internet, legal knowledge was the patrimony of the black-robed professionals. Gulliver, in one of his later voyages, landed among a people who had a “peculiar cant and jargon of their own, that no other mortal can understand, and wherein all their laws are written which they take special care to multiply, whereby they have wholly confounded the very essence of truth and falsehood, of right and wrong, so that it takes 30 years to decide whether the field left me by my ancestors for six generations belongs to me or to a stranger 300 miles off.”
It has become essential for an informed citizen to be acquainted with law these days since most social and economic issues soon get stewed in legal complexities. That is not all. There is a howl of protest from the executive and the legislature against a perceived trespass by the judiciary. On the other hand, the Supreme Court last week declared that sky is the limit when it chases justice.
With the information revolution, all laws and regulations, court orders and judgments are now available for free to everyone, anywhere in the world. One need not physically go to a law library, all of which are still closed to ordinary people. A litigant can read law regarding his problem before buying legal advice. Lawyers, like doctors, are facing tough questions because their clients have come after googling many pages on the subject.
Some court rooms are paperless, like two in the Delhi High Court. The high court is aiming at making all of them e-courts. Witnesses and people accused can be examined through jail videos. Bihar, plagued by escapes and encounters, is the pioneer in this field.
The new age has lightened the burden of files, folders and reference books for lawyers and judges. The storage area has already shrunk in the Supreme Court, though the record rooms still look Kafkaesque. The National Informatics Centre (NIC) is the agency implementing e-projects. There is an ambitious five-year plan to take the conservative judiciary into the brave new cyberworld with a budget of Rs 854 crore. The funds are still low, since the Indian judiciary comprises nearly 15,000 courts situated in approximately 2,500 court complexes.
One serious problem confronted by legal dilettantes is lack of coordination on the sites of the Supreme Court and the 21 high courts. If one wants to read the Supreme Court’s judgments, one has several choices in the search option. For example, one can go by the party’s name, the judge’s name, case number, date of the judgment, the law dealt with and a few other tags.
However, if one wants to search an important judgment of a high court, the choice is limited unless you know the lawyer, the case number or the judge’s name. Major high courts like that of Chennai, Orissa, Kerala, Chhattisgarh and Guwahati are, thus, user-unfriendly. The high courts of Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab and Haryana are a little better. The helpful hints for search given by the latter courts are even more confusing for an ordinary person. For example, it has a chart on “murder” and “brutal murder” (how do you distinguish?), and warns us not to confuse them with “promotion” (in service?).
The Allahabad High Court seems to take real pride in its 8,000-page judgment in the Ayodhya case. The welcome page invites you to read the full text (if the shortness of your life permits) and if you still skip it, there is again a separate link to it.
The Gujarat High Court has unnerving warnings on its home page. It says “the contents should not be relied upon to take any decision” and the high court or the NIC should not be sued if you do. After more than a decade, it says “at present the site is running on a test basis, where the information may not be accurate.”
The Calcutta High Court has only three options for searching judgments and orders. If you succeed in entering it, you will get thousands of orders. One recent order said the lawyer is engaged in another court and, therefore, the case has been adjourned to the next month. It is difficult to find important judgments from such mass of everyday adjournments granted at the drop of the gown.
The websites of the tribunals and other quasi-judicial forums also require revving up. The intellectual property appellate board, for instance, has not updated the information since January. The staff of all courts and tribunals should be given instructions to upload reasoned judgments, not adjournment orders, as soon as judges sign them.
If all the high courts and tribunals follow one design, or follow that of the Supreme Court, it would be easier for the public to access important rulings. Since the NIC has designed most of the sites, there is no reason why it should make things so complicated. The recent rise of public interest litigation, right to information and court interference in political and social issues have aroused the curiosity of the public and courts should enable citizens to read their views first-hand. Justice should no longer be a “cloistered virtue”.
