On Fri 07/05/10 8:36 AM , Abhijit Menon-Sen [email protected] sent: Since we have a few lawyers on the list—where does one go to find the text of the various judgements by Indian courts? Is www.judis.nic.in everything there is? How come companies like scconline.com charge INR75k for a CD of the text of the judgements? Are they offering any data that aren't available for free, or are they just charging exorbitantly just for a (presumably) pretty search interface? Well, I haven't practiced in India for some time but the JUDIS site has judgments by the Supreme Court and many High Courts (although the search engine is beyond atrocious and you occasionally won't find judgments that you know exist - either because the search is flawed or they haven't been uploaded). It's not very well known but it generally works - I found something there last week.. As for SCC etc, it's mostly (like Westlaw/LexisNexis elsewhere in the world) a question of compiling the judgment information in a more accessible and easily searchable form and offering things like summary headnotes of cases, contextualization, analysis of which cases have overruled which cases, etc (I haven't seen the latest version of SCC Online but even the older versions I saw in the earlier part of the decade did some of this - and it is standard for this type of service). It's all very useful information for legal research. Whether it is worth 75k is another matter, but they charge what they can get away with.. Badri
Links: ------ [1] http://www.judis.nic.in
