INTRODUCTION
The importance of legal research is well known to everybody in the legal fraternity. It involves basic research on the issues involved in the question. It is equally important for an advocate to know the point of law of his case to present before the court and a law student to carry out his law school work. It is an indispensable asset for both of them.
In this article, I am going to talk about five ways to search for case laws divided into two heads, namely free and paid databases. All the below mentioned ways are the most famous and most browsed online legal platform globally.
Free Databases
- Indian Kanoon: it is one of the best databases which provides unreported decision containing up to date full text of all courts. It can be searched on the basis of citation, party name, keyword, court, date range, etc.
- E-Courts: if you know the name of the parties and the court, then you can simply search it on e-court. You can find judgements of Supreme Court, High Courts and other Subordinate Courts and Tribunals. Moreover, you can find not only the status of disposing of the case but also the pending one.
- Legal Service India: It is used widely by law students, mainly due to the reason that they find it difficult to read the lengthy judgement of the court. Legal service India eliminates this hurdle by breaking lengthy law documents into the smallest possible clauses and integrating laws with a court judgement. However, it does not cover all the judgments and limits to the landmark and important case laws.
Paid Databases
The following two online databases are best if you have no specific cause in your mind and are searching for cases on a topic or a legislative provision.
- Manupatra: if you want to go through keen detailing of a case it is advisable to refer to Manupatra. It has enormous legal material of Indian as well as 11 overseas countries which include Bangladesh, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, international court of justice and so on. Legislative provisions can be found by way of legal search or from the legislation. The only thing which you have to be clear about is what you are looking for.
- SCC Online: it is a legal database containing full text and case notes of the Supreme Court of India’s decision since 1950. It not only contains Indian judgements but also the judgments by the courts of other countries and access to them depends upon the package you have chosen. Moreover, its dashboard is well organised, and you don’t need any sort of assistant from anybody because even if you are using it for the first time, you will be able to use it due to its well-organised features.
CONCLUSION
Preference depends on what you expect from a website. If you want to go into detail about your research, then I would advise you to go through Manupatra. Apart from the ways mentioned above, many other websites are provided with the case-law of India as well as other countries such as Legal crystal, Westlaw, HeinOnline, Casemine, ipleader and so on.
