Part I: Research Guide for Decisions of the Supreme Court of India

Step One: Start Your Research with Secondary Sources (Books and Articles)

Unlike the U.S. Supreme Court, the Supreme Court of India issues thousands of decisions every year. Therefore you should NOT begin your research by surfing the indlaw web site (see below) using key word searching; you will be swamped with cases. Instead, begin by reviewing several book chapters, law review articles or treatises by leading authors on your subject to identify the key cases. All the books and articles mentioned below are on reserve for this course.

For a good, current overview of most topics I suggest you begin with:
Das, Gobind "The Supreme Court: An Overview" (From Kirpal, Supreme but not Infalllible) and
Jain, M.P. "The Supreme Court and Fundamental Rights" (From Verma, Fifty Years of the Supreme Court of India)

The Kirpal and Verma books are on reserve and one xerox copy each of the Das and Jain book chapters is in the 3 ring-binder of extra materials also on reserve.

For public interest litigation and judicial activism, the best authors are:
Sathe, SP Judicial Activism and
Baxi, Uppendra, "The Avatars of Indian Judicial Activism" in Verman, Fifty Years of the Supreme Court (click here for pdf version on line) and
Agrawala, S.K. Public Interest Litigation: A Critique (Note, however, that this is very dated having been published in 1985).

For pretrial detention I suggest you begin with Jethmalani, Ram "Detention Without Trial" in Kirpal, Supreme but not Infalllible (click here for pdf version on line)
Hansaria, B. L., Right to Life and Liberty under the Constitution (A Critical Analysis of Article 21) may give you more detailed citations.

For afffirmative action begin with

Cunningham & Menon, Seeking Equality in Multicultural Societies (Paper presented at 1997 Rethinking Equality Conference) [Note the Bibliography at the end of this paper], then for an update look at Part IV of Cunningham, Loury & Skrentny, Passing Strict Scrutiny, 90 Georgetown Law Journal 835 (2002)(pre-publication edition can be downloaded into MS Word by clicking here)
A simplified overview can also be found in Cunningham, Affirmative Action: India's Example, and
Cunningham & Menon, Race, Class, Caste ... Rethinking Affirmative Action, 97 Michigan Law Review 1296 (1999)

Then, for a compilation of excellent articles on affirmative action, look at Srinivas,M.N.(editor) Caste: Its 20^th Century Avatar (click here for pdf version of table of contents and editor's introduction on line)

Galanter, Marc Competing Equalities (1984) is the most comprehensive study (but dated) (click here for pdf version of table of contents on line)

After identifying leading cases from these sources, get the decisions as described below. There is no equivalent of "Shepard's" for Indian cases but you can do the equivalent by then searching the indlaw web site using the case name and other key words to find subsequent decisions on point.

Step Two: Getting the Cases

a) Different citation formats

There are a number of different citation formats for decisions of the Indian Supreme Court. The best citation is to All India Reports ("AIR")-the format is [Plaintiff] v [Defendant], AIR [year] S.C. [for Supreme Court] [page], for example Gopalan v State of Madras, AIR 1950 SC 27.
However, there are other widely used citations, the most common being "SCC" (for Supreme Court Cases) and SCALE (which is citation used in the multivolume set of Public Interest Litigation cases on reserve). Therefore, it is important that you get as much of the full case name as possible in your citation research and if possible the specific decision date. (You will find that some names occur frequently for different cases, e.g. M.C. Mehta v. Union of India.) But see the instructions below for cases dowloaded from indlaw.

b) Getting copies of cases

I have subscribed to the best on-line source for Indian law: www.indlaw.com

The most useful section of the indlaw site for you will be their collection of Supreme Court Decisions:
http://www.scjudgments.com/
You can do text searchs (using key words,etc) for free but to access the text of a decision, you will need to log-in. You should already have received by email the User Name and Password for logging in. Do not give the password to anyone not enrolled in our seminar. I
f you get your copy of a case from this source, the citation format with be:
[Name] v [Name], [year] Indlaw SC [page] [decision date]
and will appear at the top of your downloaded text. Note that India, like England (and most of the rest of the world) lists the day of the month before the month number so that a "04/08/95" decision date is August 4, not April 8. To avoid confusion, therefore, spell out the date. For specific page citations, use the page number that appears in the header when you print from the internet,e.g.

Hussainara Khatoon v. Home Secretary, Bihar, 1994 Indlaw SC 2001 (August 4, 1995) at p. 2.

(This number will of course only be approximately because different internet browsers will format and paginate somewhat differently, but it's the best we can do.)

Other useful sections of the indlaw site are:
Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about the Indian Legal System
Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about the Supreme Court of India
Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about sources of law
Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about public interest litigation
IndLaw News
Human Rights

If the IndLaw site is down, you can also access Supreme Court decisions since January 2001 from http://www.allindiareporter.com/
You need to register as a subscriber to use this site but there is no charge for the subscription. Unfortunately, only issues starting in January 2001 are on line (which includes some decisions actually issued in 2000). It does have a key word search function; select the Advanced Search Option and use 2000-01-01 and [current date] for the date parameters. AIR is considered the best citation source for Indian cases, comparable to West in the U.S.

Also on course reserve are 3 volumes of Public Interest Litigation cases. The table of cases in the front of each volume are not cumulative of prior volumes; the page numbers refer to pages in that particular volume. Click below for the table of cases for each volume:
Volume II
Volume III
Volume IV