In India, you have always paid to read the law. A court hears a case in open court, and the judgment it delivers is a public document, yet to read that document you either pay for a subscription or you go to a free site and get a raw copy of it - a title line, a list of citations, a summary that stops in the middle of a sentence, and the judgment itself somewhere below, in the broken lines of the PDF it was copied from. If you are a lawyer checking a citation before it goes into a court document, or a junior who has been asked to find the paragraph a senior half-remembers, this costs you time every working day.
A few weeks ago, we opened the Miss Lucy law library to everyone. It holds 57,738 judgments from 62 courts, the earliest decided in 1885, and every one of them is free to read in a browser, with no login and nothing to pay. The Supreme Court is there, and so are the High Courts whose judgments we have finished cleaning.
Each judgment has its own page, and the page is built for the way a lawyer reads. The text is cleaned up, so the paragraphs read as paragraphs rather than broken lines. The citations are gathered in one place, and 44,052 of the pages carry two or more of them, so whether you arrive with the SCC citation or the AIR or the neutral citation, you land on the same page. At the top of the page is the ratio. The ratio at the top of each page is Miss Lucy's reading of the judgment, and it is labelled as hers, so you know it is not the court's own words. It sits above the full text, so checking it against the judgment takes a minute, and if the two ever disagree, the judgment wins and we want to know about it.
The texts come from public sources - the courts' own websites and public archives - and we clean each one before it is published. You can also browse the library by court and by year, so before you rely on it, you can see for yourself exactly what is covered and what is not. New judgments are added as the courts deliver them.
We made the library free because a judgment was never ours to charge for. Miss Lucy is a paid product, and lawyers use her to research, to draft, and to check their work against these same judgments; that is how we make our living. But the reading that the work rests on is public property, and we did not want to become one more paywall in front of it. The library is what Miss Lucy reads from, and what we charge for is what comes after the reading - what later courts have said about a judgment, what it means for the matter on your desk, and the draft that comes out of that. Every page in the library ends with a way to ask her those questions, and that is where the paid work begins.
There is a selfish reason too. The free library is how a great many lawyers first meet Miss Lucy. Someone types a case name or a citation into Google, lands on the page, checks what they came to check, and notices that the same page can tell them what later courts have said about the judgment. Some of those people become customers, and we are glad of it, but the page would be free even if none of them did, because a citation check should not need a subscription.
This matters most outside the large firms. A great deal of the Bar works without a database subscription at all — the lawyer in a district court, or the in-house counsel who needs one judgment on a Friday evening — and for them, whether the judgment gets read at all depends on whether it costs nothing.
The library is not complete, and it is not perfect. There are judgments we hold but have not published, because the text, a citation, or a date did not meet the standard we set, and some published pages still display less well than I would like. When you find one, send us the case name and we will fix it.
Judge it on the page itself. Open the library, type the name of a case you know, or a citation — (2014) 8 SCC 273 will do — and compare the ratio at the top with the headnote in your own books. Then tell me what you think.
Aniruddha Sen is the co-founder of Miss Lucy.
The library is at https://miss-lucy.in/judgments/
<This is a sponsored post>