[Commons-Law] Re: Open Source Access for Basic Legal Materials

[rohan george]

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I agree that in india, its rather hard to find proper government sponsored sites for legal information. On the other hand, I have to give it to all those individuals out there who actually take the trouble to put up basic legal materials for access to all. I also think that if one knows where to look, one could find a lot of basic legal information in india, except maybe for high court and tribunal decisions. For example,

For Bare Acts, you have 
http://www.mahalibrary.com/ 
as well as 
http://www.indialawinfo.com/
Membership for the first is free, though membership for the second is paid. however, the second has enough free resources such as bare acts, sample agreements and notifications to be quite useful.

For cases, at least supreme court decisions seeem well covered with 
http://www.supremecourtonline.com/
This site seems to be run by a publisher in chandigarh. I dont know what they get out of it, but they're still doing it.

The major problem however, seems to be more of a matter of a proper search engine with proper cross referencing facilities. Something sadly lacking on most sites, and definitely on the government sites. It is this which makes searching on the paid sites like manupatra, lexisnexis and westlaw so much better. 
I think its quite possible to make some sort of an omnibus legal portal  nowadays. The only problem is getting all the data to "one place", so to speak, on the net, and developing a proper search engine, without which, you're largely gone when searching online.