A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post on the sorry state of digital archives of legal scholarship in India. Since then, I have had many responses on archives and searches that do exist at the moment, and several initiatives being taken in this direction. This post is to summarize these responses and acknowledge these initiatives.

Shamnaad has already introduced Sushant in a previous post. Sushant has made Supreme Court cases searchable in a user-friendly fashion that should put some of the subscription sites to shame. Indian Kanoon, his search engine promises to include High Court decisions, Constituent Assembly Debates, Law Commission Reports and journal articles in its database very soon.

The other person I want to introduce is Devranjan, a third year student at National Law School, Bangalore. Along with some other students, he has founded the ‘Open Book Society’. Their purpose is to digitize and make searchable archives of important Indian Journals. They have already managed to do this for the Central India Law Quarterly and the National Law School of India Review. They need prior permission from journals to digitize them. As I understand it, they put in all the effort into doing so themselves – the Journals just have to agree. This is a fantastic initiative and deserves all praise and help. This is the message he asked me to pass on:

'Would u be able to help the society in any way for instance
raising money, getting journals, or just giving us
better visibility?'

If anyone wants to get in touch with Devranjan, please let me know and I will put you in touch with him.

Here is the list of freely available articles, indices and search options that I found out in the last two weeks. Only some of this is really good quality, but hopefully the other established journals like the Journal of Indian Law Institute, Indian Journal of International Law, the journal section of Supreme Court Cases, Cochin University Law Review, Indian Bar Review and other journals published by various law schools will learn from the Central India Law Quarterly and let Devranjan’s team digitize their archives.

Freely accessible online articles:
Central India Law Quarterly
National Law School of India Review
Indian Journal of International Law (only table of contents is archived)
Scholasticus – Journal of National Law University (only table of contents is archived)
National Law Institute University WebJournal
The Practical Lawyer
Lawyers’ Collective Magazine (only current issue is online – I could not locate the archives)
Combat Law
Manupatra Articles
IndLaw Articles
Legal Services India Articles

Free search engines:
Indian Kanoon
NLSIU Journal Index

Please let me know if I have missed out anything and I will
update these lists.