Law Reports, Law Magazines and How to Find a Case

Reportable and non-reportable

Not every decision is reported. The Supreme Court itself marks judgments "Reportable" or "Non-Reportable", and the reporters exercise their own judgment beyond that. A short order applying settled law to particular facts adds nothing to the law and is not reported.

Official and private reports

Official reports are published by or under the authority of the court itself. For the Supreme Court that is the Supreme Court Reports, cited as SCC in its private form and SCR in the official one.

Private reports are published commercially. All India Reporter, cited AIR, is the oldest and most widely used in India; Supreme Court Cases, cited SCC, is the other standard series.

The point students miss about parallel citations

The same judgment appears in several reports at once, at different volumes and pages. The case worked in [D.K. Basu v. State of West Bengal] is AIR 1997 SC 610 in one series and (1997) 1 SCC 416 in another. Both references point at the same judgment; neither is wrong.

That is why a citation is quoted with its series. "1997 SC 610" means nothing without the "AIR".

Law magazines

What they are

A law magazine, or journal, is a periodical carrying articles, case comments, legislative notes and news, written by academics and practitioners.

What they are for, and what they are not

They are secondary material. A journal article is not law and is not binding on anybody. Its value is in the analysis: an article can trace a line of cases, expose a conflict between High Courts, or argue that a decision was wrongly reasoned, and courts and counsel read them for that.

Some publications do both jobs: a series may carry reported judgments in one part and articles in another, which is why a citation with the letter "J" for journal in it points at an article and not at a case.

Where they fit in the sources of law

Under article 38(1)(d) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice, the teachings of the most highly qualified publicists are a subsidiary means for determining rules of international law. In Indian domestic law the position is simpler: a text or an article is persuasive only, and a court may adopt its reasoning or reject it. The chapter on [External Aids to the Interpretation of a Statute] returns to this.

Explanation of citations

How a citation is built

Read the four parts in order and any citation becomes legible.

The year, in one of two forms. In square brackets, as in [1955] 2 SCR 603, the year is an essential part of the reference: the volumes are numbered afresh each year and you cannot find the case without it. In round brackets, as in (1997) 1 SCC 416, the year is helpful but not essential, because the volume number runs on continuously.

The volume number, where the series has more than one volume in a year.

The abbreviation of the report, which is the name of the series.

The page or the case number at which the report begins.

So (1997) 1 SCC 416 reads: the first volume of Supreme Court Cases for 1997, at page 416. And AIR 1997 SC 610 reads: All India Reporter for 1997, Supreme Court section, page 610.

The court, when it is not in the series name

AIR covers every court, so it adds a code: SC for the Supreme Court, Bom for the Bombay High Court, Del, Cal, Mad, All and so on. "AIR 1987 SC 1086" is therefore a Supreme Court decision, and "AIR 1986 Bom 1" is a Bombay High Court decision.

What a citation is not

It is not a description of the case, it does not tell you whether the decision is still good law, and it does not tell you the bench strength. All three have to be checked separately.

When there is no report reference

Sometimes a judgment has been read and no report reference has been. The honest form then is to give the court and the date of the judgment, and to say nothing about the volume. This book does exactly that for Indian Young Lawyers Association v. State of Kerala, decided on 28 September 2018, because the citation MU prints for it could not be verified against the judgment.

The search of a case law

The steps, in order

One, know what you are looking for. Not "a case on cheating", but the proposition you need: "whether a mistake of fact in good faith is a defence where the statute makes knowledge an ingredient". A vague search returns everything.

Two, start from the statute. Find the section first. Most annotated editions of an Act print the leading cases under each section, and that is the fastest route from a provision to the decisions on it.

Three, use a digest or an index. A digest arranges decisions by subject and by section, and is designed for exactly this.

Four, follow the citations backwards. Every judgment lists the cases it relied on. One good recent case gives you the line behind it.

Five, follow them forwards. A citator tells you which later cases have referred to this one, and how: followed, distinguished, doubted, overruled.

Six, read the judgment, not the summary. The headnote points you to the passage; the passage is what you cite.

The question in the form the paper sets it

The examination does not ask "how do you find a case". It asks, in terms, "describe the search of the case on 'whether a contract without free consent is voidable'", and it does that as a short note worth six marks. What is wanted is a method applied to that proposition, and this is what a full answer looks like.

Step one: turn the proposition into legal words. "Whether a contract without free consent is voidable" contains three terms of art: contract, free consent and voidable. Those, and not the everyday words, are what the search is made on.

Step two: find the provision first. Free consent is defined in the Indian Contract Act 1872, and the Act says what follows when consent is not free. The provision is the anchor: it fixes the language the judgments will use and it gives the section number under which annotations and digests file the cases.

Step three: use a digest or an annotated edition of the Act. Both arrange decisions section by section, so the cases on that section are listed together. This is faster than any search by subject, because it uses the draftsman's vocabulary rather than yours.

Step four: read the leading case and follow its citations backwards. Every judgment lists the authorities it relied on, so one good recent decision opens the line behind it.

Step five: follow them forwards with a citator, which shows which later decisions have referred to the case and how: followed, distinguished, doubted or overruled.

Step six: read the judgment, not the headnote, and note the exact passage, because that is what will be cited.

Step seven: check the case is still good law, and check whether the provision has been amended since the judgment was delivered.

Step eight: record the citation in full, with the parallel citation if there is one, and the bench strength, since a decision of a larger bench prevails over a smaller one.

The same eight steps answer every version of this question, and only steps one and two change with the proposition. For "whether a contract by a minor is void ab initio" the anchor is the provision on the capacity of parties to contract; for "whether a contract against public policy is invalid" it is the provision on lawful consideration and object.

Checking that the case is still good law

This is the step that is skipped and it is the one that loses cases.

A decision may have been overruled by a larger bench, as Sowmithri Vishnu and two others were in Joseph Shine v. Union of India, AIR 2018 SC 4898. It may have been superseded by statute. It may have been referred to a larger bench, which is what happened to the Sabarimala judgment when review petitions were dealt with in 2019. Or the provision it construed may have been repealed and re-enacted, which is what section 8 of the General Clauses Act 1897 addresses and what [Repeal of Statutes, and the Provisions Dealing with Repeal under the General Clauses Act] works out.

Reading a judgment: ratio and obiter

Two terms every answer on this topic should define.

Ratio decidendi means "the reason for the decision": the principle of law on which the decision actually rests, applied to the material facts. That is the part which binds.

Obiter dictum means "a thing said by the way": an observation not necessary to the decision. It is persuasive and it does not bind.

Where several judges write separately, work out what the majority held. In Joseph Shine five judges wrote four opinions and all concurred in striking down section 497, so the result is unanimous. In Indian Young Lawyers Association v. State of Kerala four judges formed the majority and Indu Malhotra J. dissented, so her opinion, however fully reasoned, is the minority. MU's topic 3.2 asks about exactly this distinction, and it is worked in the six case chapters.

Abbreviations of law reports

The abbreviations MU expects, with what each stands for.

A worked example

Aparna is asked to find the law on whether a court may look at the speech of the Minister who moved a Bill when construing the Act.

She starts from the subject, not from a case name. The proposition is: are parliamentary materials an aid to construction?

She looks for a leading decision. She finds K.P. Varghese v. Income Tax Officer, Ernakulam, AIR 1981 SC 1922. Reading the citation: All India Reporter, 1981, Supreme Court, page 1922.

She reads the judgment and not the headnote. Facts. The assessee sold his Ernakulam house in 1965 to his daughter in law and five of his children for the same price he had paid in 1958, and the Income Tax Officer sought to tax a capital gain under section 52(2) of the Income Tax Act 1961 on the footing that the fair market value exceeded the declared consideration by more than fifteen per cent. Held. Section 52(2) applies only where the consideration has in fact been understated, and the burden of proving understatement lies on the Revenue; and the Court reached that reading by using the speech of the Finance Minister moving the amendment, the marginal note to section 52, the placement of the sub section, the word "declared" inside it, and two circulars of the Central Board of Direct Taxes, which it treated as binding on the Revenue and as being in the nature of contemporanea expositio. Why it matters. One judgment uses four different external aids and says what each is worth, which is exactly what Aparna needed.

She checks it is still good law, by looking for later cases that have considered it.

She notes the parallel citation she also finds, (1981) 4 SCC 173, and records both.

And she writes down where the passage is, so that she can quote it rather than paraphrase it. The chapter on [External Aids to the Interpretation of a Statute] is where that research is used.

Distinctions table

What these things do NOT mean

A headnote is not the judgment. It is an editor's summary and it carries no authority.

A citation does not prove a case is good law. Overruling, statutory supersession and a reference to a larger bench are all invisible in the citation.

Parallel citations are not different cases. AIR 1997 SC 610 and (1997) 1 SCC 416 are one judgment in two series.

"J" in a citation does not mean judgment. It means the journal section, so the reference is to an article.

A law magazine is not a source of law, however distinguished the author.

Limits and criticism

Reporting is selective, and the selection is not neutral. What gets reported shapes what gets cited, and a correct decision that is never reported has no influence at all.

Parallel citations make verification harder than it should be. A single official neutral citation for every judgment would solve it, and adoption in India has been partial.

Headnotes are widely relied on because they are quick, and they are the single most common source of misquotation in a first-year answer.

Quick revision

Law report: the text of judgments, with name, citation, court and bench, date, headnote, cases cited and the judgment. The headnote binds nobody. Reportable and non-reportable. Official (SCR) and private (AIR, SCC). Article 141 is why reporting matters.

Law magazine: articles and comment, secondary and persuasive only.

Citation: year, volume, series abbreviation, page. Square brackets mean the year is essential; round brackets mean it is not. AIR adds a court code, SC, Bom, Del. Parallel citations are one case in two series. Where no report reference has been read, give the court and the date.

Searching: state the proposition, start from the section, use a digest, follow citations backwards and forwards, read the judgment not the headnote, and check the case is still good law. Ratio decidendi binds; obiter dictum persuades; identify the majority where judges write separately.

Test yourself

1. What is a law report, and what parts does a reported case have?

A law report is a publication containing the authentic text of judgments of the superior courts, arranged and indexed so that a decision can be found and cited. A reported case carries the name of the case, the citation, the court and the names of the judges, the date of judgment, a headnote summarising the facts and the holdings, lists of cases and provisions considered and of counsel, and the judgment itself. Only the judgment has authority; the headnote is the reporter's work.

2. Explain the citation AIR 1987 SC 1086 and (1997) 1 SCC 416.

AIR 1987 SC 1086 means the All India Reporter for 1987, Supreme Court section, at page 1086; AIR reports every court, so the code SC identifies the Supreme Court. (1997) 1 SCC 416 means volume 1 of Supreme Court Cases for 1997, at page 416; the year is in round brackets because the volume number identifies the book and the year is merely helpful. A year in square brackets, as in [1955] 2 SCR 603, is an essential part of the reference because that series numbers its volumes afresh each year.

3. Distinguish a law report from a law magazine.

A law report contains the text of judgments, and what it prints has whatever authority the deciding court has, binding or persuasive according to the hierarchy. A law magazine or journal contains articles, case comment, legislative notes and news, written by academics and practitioners; it is secondary material, persuasive at most, and never binding. Some series carry both, which is why a citation containing "J" points at the journal section and so at an article rather than at a case.

4. What are the steps in finding a case, and which step is most often skipped?

State the proposition you need rather than a topic; start from the statutory provision and its annotations; use a digest arranged by subject and section; follow the citations in a good judgment backwards to the line behind it; use a citator to follow them forwards to later decisions; and read the judgment itself rather than the headnote. The step most often skipped is the last check, whether the case is still good law, since it may have been overruled by a larger bench, superseded by statute, referred to a larger bench, or founded on a provision since repealed.

5. Distinguish ratio decidendi from obiter dictum.

The ratio decidendi is the reason for the decision: the principle of law on which the decision rests, applied to the material facts, and it is the part that binds according to the hierarchy of courts. An obiter dictum is a thing said by the way, an observation not necessary to the result, which is persuasive only. Identifying the ratio matters most where several judges write separately, because what binds is the proposition the majority agreed upon and not the reasoning of any single opinion.

6. Why does article 141 make law reporting necessary?

Article 141 provides that the law declared by the Supreme Court shall be binding on all courts within the territory of India. A rule of that kind can only work if the declarations are discoverable, so a system of reporting that records the text of judgments, indexes them and gives each a stable citation is what makes the article operative in practice. Reporting also improves the judgments themselves, because a decision written for publication is written with more care than one that will not be read outside the case.