Prashant Iyengar of Alternative Law Forum and the Center for Internet and Society, has posted the abstract of his 2010 report on free access to law in India, entitled Free Access to Law: Is It Here to Stay? India, Country Report (July 2010), on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Sometime in early 2008, Sushant Sinha, an Indian computer science doctoral candidate from Michigan University began offering free access to decisions of the Indian Supreme Court via his website IndianKanoon.org (IK) . In the ensuing two years, IK has grown exponentially and has become one of the most popular websites for accessing Indian legal materials, hosting over 1.2 million documents at the time of this writing. This paper is styled as a ‘case study’ that probes the IndianKanoon story – its genesis, successes and impacts – in some detail. This is also a paper that interrogates the conditions that make a site like IndianKanoon possible. It seeks an answer to the question: Viewed from what frame do the actions of one man unilaterally deciding to host over a million legal documents online for free become sensible?
For the full text of the report, please contact Mr. Iyengar.
Dr. Sinha recently described his system, Indian Kanoon, in a post at VoxPopuLII.
Mr. Iyengar recently wrote about free access to law in India, and about his free law system, OpenJudis, in a post at VoxPopuLII.
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