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

[Lawrence Liang]

Hi Rohan

this an an idea that I have at different levels been
tryiong to pursue, the thing is that it is nnot really
difficult to  do something like this, given that all
of the data is already available in digital format
through SCC onlien, manupatra and Grand Jurix. and as
Grand jurix have themselves shownh un Eastern Book v.
Navin desai, there is no copyright in the cases
themselves, we just need to 'free the data' which is
available in properietary databases.

We had written out something on this which I am
including. of thinking through the idea of making a
database available.

Lawrence




i. Creating  A Public Legal Resource

Very often the absence of imaginative spaces in a
particular discipline emerges in contrast to
innovative spaces created in other disciplines. This
revelation should however also allow for a creative
change within the traditional spaces , transforming
the very grounds of its practice. In the realms of
software and media, there have been radical challenges
made to the idea of centralised production and
dissemination of information but these developments
have not been adequately emulated within the realm of
law. One of the biggest constraints in doing socio
legal research in India has been the absence of a
tradition of public institutions and the other is that
of a collaborative model of research. This lack is
felt at two levels:

a.	The absence of public legal resources. (Even
institutions which are supposed to be ‘public’ like
high court libraries are in fact accessible only by
advocates). It is also common knowledge that the best
law libraries in India are owned not by any public
institution or educational institution, but by
individual practitioners.
b.	In addition to the absence of public institutions
there is a larger conceptual problem of the absence of
a tradition of ‘public research’. Research has
traditionally been seen as an activity which is an
adjunct to academic work and carried out by individual
scholars or academics, rather than as a public
activity carried out by a network of researchers,
practitioners, scholars and researchers.

The institutional and conceptual poverty at the level
of legal research is revealed by the striking
inability of legal scholarship to adapt to
methodological and other innovations that have been
taking place in various other disciplines from
literature to software. We are particularly motivated
for instance by the creative possibilities that a
collaborative model like the free software / open
source model enables. 



The Publicness of a  Legal Resource

The invocation of ‘public’ in India is often fraught
with dangers of complexity. There are a number of ways
in which we use the term ‘critical public legal
resource’ (CPLR) and it is important to map them out.
The most critical manner in which we refer to the idea
of a public legal resource is in the ‘publicness’ of
the space. What drives us towards the idea of a public
resource is the belief that institutional spaces do
not merely serve in an instrumental manner towards
making information available, but provide a space for
the coming together of a critical public itself. 


•	We imagine a space where new and old media forms are
used to enable people to have access to legal and
other information that in the present context is not
easily available. These could include practitioners,
students, academics, researchers and activists. There
are currently very few institutions which can truly be
described as being of a public nature which provides
facilities such as a world class library, archival
database, electronic data etc. One could probably name
the Indian law Institute in Delhi and the National Law
School in Bangalore as institutions which have the
trappings of a public resource. It is also important
to note that despite the fact that legal decisions and
judgments are public domain information, they are
sometimes the most difficult information to access. 

•	While digitalization has made cases and decisions
more accessible in terms of cost, they are still not
available freely and the government charges for these
decisions. Certain private players like Manuptra.com
also provide these services to the ‘public’ but at the
rate of Rs. 16 per judgment. We believe that if we
were to even make all the cases and decisions in India
thus far available to the public via the internet,
cheap CD’s, various customized  electronic databases
etc. it would be an unprecedented move and perhaps the
best example of ‘free as in freedom of speech’ within
the legal domain. It is akin to making available the
basic GNU code that Stallman made available to the
world.

•	If public domain information such as cases and
decisions are not easy to come by, then more
qualitative information in the form of commentaries
and journal articles are almost impossible to access.
The idea behind building an institutional space which
provides an easy access point to the public is then
our first motivation for creating a ‘public legal
resource’. Given the paucity of quality legal
materials available in India, the first steps towards
the creation of a critical legal research community
would consist of the creation of the backbone or the
raw materials for such a community. This would be
through collaboratively creating compilations of cases
and other readings materials. The idea is similar to
the way in which coders contributed to the Linus
Torvalds’s kernel, namely contributions by academics,
students and other users from different disciplines.
It also links up crucially to the kind of publics that
you attempt to create. 
One example of this is the current copyright database
that we are making available for the general public.
What we have attempted to do in the current module on
copyright for instance is to create reading materials
on various introductory topics on copyright. We then
invite users who find this database useful to send in
interesting cases that they may find which can be
updated on the database or any user interested in
particular area can take the responsibility of
creating a module for that area. The modules can then
be updated online and also a new version of the CD
brought out every six months so that in three- four
years we have a substantial public resource on
copyright. The experiment can then be replicated with
other areas of law from patents and trademarks to
constitutional law, property laws, media laws etc. In
addition any person interested in creating a  public
resource on an area of personal interest may also take
the initiative to do so., e.g. a specialized area like
law and poetry. We believe that legal scholarship can
only be enriched through a strong interdisciplinary
approach and towards that end we hope that this public
resource will excite academics, practitioners and
students form other disciplines such as cultural
studies, history, economics etc to participate in the
creation of the CPLR

•	We believe that the creation of a public legal
resource also has significant impact in terms of the
creation of a legal public itself. If the legal
profession as been a highly hierarchical one, it is in
no small measure due to the high costs involved in the
building of a personal library. One of the entry
barriers of the legal profession is the fact that
legal information is not easily available thereby
perpetrating an almost genetic practice of the law
where if you inherit a law library, you also inherit a
great legal future. It also links up crucially to the
kind of legal public that you want to constitute. We
obviously don’t see ourselves in an evangelical
‘improve the legal profession’ manner, we see
ourselves interrogating the normative basis that the
law assumes for itself through the kind of information
we provide.

•	We also use the phrase ‘public legal resource’ to
interrogate the basis of the idea of a what
constitutes a public in terms of legal research. Thus
far legal research has  been confined to legal
practitioners, a few social activists  who have had no
choice but to become quasi lawyers as a result of the
demands of the movements that they are a part of.
Coming as we do from the belief that law is a socially
constituted discourse, we believe that it is
imperative in the imagination of a new space for us to
widen the ambit of the idea of legal research itself.
For us the idea of a public legal resource takes into
account the various publics who would be interested in
various aspects of law. One of the ways in which we
can cater towards a vibrant community around legal
issues is by focusing on a strong inter disciplinary
approach in the building of the legal resource itself.
We believe that the creation of a space that self
consciously represents itself as a legal resource
center that caters to non legal professionals will
assist in the building of a dialogue between legal
academics, professionals, students and the non legal
community. 

•	If we locate our venture as being one that is
inspired by the open source community we also have no
hesitation in stating our reservation with the open
source model as reflected purely in the context of
software. It is the interface of law as code and code
as law that has appeal to us. Much as we would like
the legal community to experiment with the ideas of
collaborative production and distribution, we also
feel that a new public would interrogate the practice
of the open source community as well, where coders
need to reflect critically on their practices within
the larger discourse of intellectual property. 

•	The idea of a networked research community attempts
to reconfigure modes of the production of knowledge
itself, with a recognition that research is dependent
not on the efforts of an individual but to a
multiplicity of sources. Implicit in this recognition
of the mode and manner in which research is carried
out, we also believe that research consist of making
available the maps and resources that the researcher
has relied on to navigate his/ her way through a 
field.


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