So what do you do if you need to find information about Indian laws and how is it interpreted?
Most of the times, you end up paying lots of money to lawyers to extract info and be at their mercy for the interpretation.
Sushant, computer science student at Univ. of Michigan has launched IndianKanoon, a search engine to find info about Indian laws and court judgements.
“While it is commendable to make law documents available to common people, it is still quite difficult for common people to easily find the required information. The first problem is that acts are very large and in most scenarios just a few section of laws are applicable. Finding most applicable sections from hundreds of pages of law documents is too daunting for common people.
Secondly, laws are often vague and one needs to see how they have been interpreted by the judicial courts. Currently, the laws and judgments are separately maintained and to find judgments that interpret certain law clauses is difficult. ”
Indiankanoon breaks law documents into smallest possible clause and by integrating law/statutes with court judgments. A tight integration of court judgments with laws and with themselves allows automatic determination of the most relevant clauses and court judgments.”
Indiankanoon.com sources data from indiacode.nic.in and all supreme court judgments from judis.nic.in, and crawls these sites for updates.
Give IndianKanoon a spin and do share your comments.
tags: IndianKanoon
Excellent idea , niche but very very useful . i played with it for some time running all kind of query like Aviation Fare refunding norms , child adoption policy , eve teasing,excise duty violation . result were satisfactory for my purpose .
but for some general query like
#1 Maharashtra rent control act where landlord won
#2 cases against lalu prasad yadav
#3 cases against DTC
result were there but formatting of snippet were not comprehensive for a potential end user .these can be biggest use case for this idea. collaborate with lawyer or checking out general trend of judgment before you consult a lawyer. background info about a company . potential investor etc .
it would be great if they can show outcome of case in result snippet . like who come out winner [Defense or plaintiff ] and a filter of same effect . parsing the index for that shouldn’t be a problem
over all a cool and much needed idea .
Thanks Sushant
Ashish correct the link for “IndianKanoon” in your post.
a comma popped in … instead of a “.”
They had one problem[as mentioned above] – making relevant stuff available … and they have done well.- these are very very long. I couldn’t read even one fully. may b dats cause dat was nt of my interest. somebody els will.
I think they can add some features like
- allow people to add tags to the case histories.
- let law students have some funshun with this site. they will definitely add some value. like taggin and other features….
Hi Ashish,
This is a really nice move by Sushant and I belive such startups would definitely make us more knowledgeable and lead to a better system.
But I would also congratulate you on your effort to post on Indian startups. I recently subscribed to your feed. Just out of curiosity I would like to know how do you update yourself on new startups. Are they featured in magazines or elsewhere?
Thanks Ashish for spreading the word on IndianKanoon and everyone for giving it a try.
Prasanth is pointing out some of the interesting ways in which people feed the search engine and I have seen many people posting natural language queries like “Maharashtra rent control act where landlord won”, “cases against DTC” etc.
It will be really nice if we can satisfactorily answer these queries. However, there are two big problem with answering such search queries. First to unambiguously understand what a person meant in natural language is hard. Ask.com has done a good job of this and there are some open source natural language parser that I can give a try. Even if you understand the query, the second problem is how will you execute it. You need a very well structured document like what all sections a particular judgment invalidated, what all precedents it accepted or rejected, who won or lost a case. Providing answers to many questions like that is not easy until and unless we have a very well structured document. Right now Indian Kanoon extract citations but not the qualitative issues like invalidated or accepted a particular law/precedent. I am thinking of allowing people to add such tags when they read a judgment and we will have a rich structured data to answer such queries in future. It is not easy to do add such tags right now but I am working towards it.
I think people will continue to use natural language for querying and so for the time being I am thinking of removing certain words like “supreme court”, “cases”, “judgments” etc from the search and ranking. Removing these words from search and ranking actually improves relevance in many cases. This is not unusual considering words like for, of, the are never used in search and ranking.
A second thing I have noticed is that I do not have “Did you mean?” feature which helps people when they commit spelling errors like “Sanhay Dutt” instead of “Sanjay Dutt”. This should be done soon. I wish I had the google code for this
Thanks again for your comments which helps me improve the search engine. Feel free to post such issues on indiankanoon forums and we can have more open and public discussion about how to improve this search engine.
We made an effort for collecting real estate related legal information on our website. I faced similar experiences as yours. Kudos.
Pingback: AdvocateKhoj - Get Legal Help Online, Find advocates for your legal need |Technology and Business Startups in India
provide the latest judgement on retrenchment terminantion in INDUTRIAL DISPUTE ACT,1947
Dear Sushant:
what you have created has, become essential to many not so deadline abiding law students, as of now you server seems to be down(28/07/09) and is causing some serious agony. Please rectify it, quite a few us here in bangalore, bless you the night before our paper submission
best,
Vivek.
here is a quick update on the problem on the indian kanoon server
http://sushant354.blogspot.com/2009/07/failure-of-software-upgrade-on-indian.html
gud gr8
great post! If you’re looking for more advice about structured settlements, you can find additional resources : structured settlement lawyer
Dear Sushant,
I am concerned that mine and my son’s personal details come up in Google via this site. The genral public should not have access to entire details ( as nowadays prospective employers also look in search engines ).I am very concerned that it will personally affect any of us and that it breaches our privacy.
My request / wish is that it should be taken off this site. I am willing to discuss further.
Dr Sukanya Roy
Please read the following post and the cited blog-post:
http://indiankanoon.org/cms/forums/viewtopic/551/
You should approach a court for name anonymization. I or google are only intermediaries. I do not take such requests.
Sushant,
Thank you for your reply.
What you ask is almost an impossible task for an individual – ie anonymization by courts.
However what the site can do is to restrict availability only to registered members. Not everything needs to be in public domain for viewing.And since you are gathering this data (law courts are not putting it in public domain, I am again requesting that something shoulde be done by your site.
Sukanya
Amazing amazing site. You have really helped out law students and other people by this initiative. And its free! Thanks so much.
HI SUSHANT
YOU HAVE DONE AN EXCELLENT JOB, BEING A LAWYER I SALUTE FOR YOUR DEDICATION WHICH OUR LAWYER FRATERNITY COULD NOT DO.
THANKS BUDDY
I am glad I came across the “IndianKanoon”. My interest has been for a long time to know how courts look at societies registered under the Societies Registration Act and at cooperatives registered under the Cooperative Societies Act vis-a-vis Constitution of India. All these years, I was dependent on various law journals and these are available with senior lawyers and in some select libraries. A couple of weeks ago, I found “IndianKanoon” that happens to be a mine of information. Many thanks to Sushant for creating this wonderful facility.
hello sir,
explain about purpose of law office system and what is law office system