Legal Databases and How to Search Them

Two: use the vocabulary of the sources. Statutes and judgments use particular words, and a search in ordinary language misses them. Not free lawyer for poor people but legal services and legal aid; not clinic rules but legal services clinics regulations.

Three: search for the instrument, not for the proposition. Find the Act, then read it. A search for a proposition returns other people's statements of it.

Four: use the number when you have it. A section number, an Act number and year, a case citation or a notification number will find the thing itself and nothing else.

Five: read the result to see what it is. A page that summarises a section is not the section. This is the single most useful discipline in online legal research, and it takes two seconds.

Six: verify currency. Chapter 950.

A worked example: a search, step by step

The question. Under what power were the Rules of Legal Education 2008 made, and have they been amended?

Step one. Identify the parent Act. The rules are made by the Bar Council of India, so the Act is the Advocates Act 1961.

Step two. Find the Act on India Code and read section 49, the general rule making power, looking for a clause about legal education. Clause (1)(af) is the one. Also read section 7(1)(h), which is the function.

Step three. Search India Code for the rules themselves, using the source's own vocabulary: Bar Council of India Rules Part IV Legal Education Rules 2008. The item is there under that name.

Step four, the one students skip. Search for an amendment. The same corpus carries an item named for the Legal Education First Amendment Rules, and its filename records that it is a Bar Council circular of 2016.

Step five. Read the rules and confirm that rule 1 gives the title and that rule 47 prescribes the amending procedure, which requires circulation to the universities and State Bar Councils and notification on the website. That last fact tells you where future amendments will appear, which is the real answer to the question.

Total time: under an hour, and the result is attached to instruments a reader can open.

Traps

The summary that looks like a source. Many pages reproduce a section under a heading that looks official. Check for the arrangement of sections, the footnotes and the amendment history; a real official text has them.

The other State's Act. A search for an Act by name may return a State enactment of the same name.

The unamended copy. A page put up in 2011 and never touched.

The paywall that hides the check. Free databases carry judgments but may not carry the apparatus that tells you whether a case has been overruled, which is why chapter 950 teaches how to check without one.

Machine written summaries. Increasingly common, frequently plausible and sometimes wrong, and MU's own circular prohibits the use of such tools for the dissertation, chapter 1390.

And the dead link in old writing. A citation to a URL that no longer resolves is not evidence that the source is gone.

Keeping what you find

Record the citation at the moment of finding, not later. The commonest cause of a lost source is confidence that it will be easy to find again.

Record where you found it and when, because official sites move.

Keep a copy of the text you actually used, since a page may change under you. This book keeps every Act and judgment it relies on as a file in its own folder for exactly this reason.

And keep a search log. What you searched, where, and what it returned. It saves repetition, and it is what allows a methodology chapter to be written honestly, chapter 1310.

Quick revision

Free sources: India Code for legislation and subordinate legislation; the Gazette for notifications, commencement and prescribed amounts; court websites for authoritative judgments; free full text databases for searchable judgments; and official report and circular sites.

A subscription adds apparatus, headnotes, digests, citators and cross-references, not the law.

Six rules: know what you seek before typing; use the sources' own vocabulary; search for the instrument rather than the proposition; use the number when you have it; read the result to see what it is; and verify currency.

Traps: the summary that looks like a source; another State's Act of the same name; the unamended copy; the missing citator; machine written summaries; and the dead link in old writing, which does not mean the source is gone.

Keep: the citation at the moment of finding, the place and date, a copy of the text used, and a search log.

Test yourself

1. Name four free sources of Indian primary legal material and say what each is for. India Code, for Central and State legislation and subordinate legislation; the Gazette, for notifications carrying commencement, appointed dates and prescribed amounts; the websites of the Supreme Court and the High Courts, for authoritative judgments; and the Law Commission's own site and departmental sites, for reports and circulars.

2. Give the six rules of effective searching. Know what you are looking for before typing; use the vocabulary the sources themselves use; search for the instrument rather than for a proposition about it; use the section number, Act number or citation when you have it; read the result to see whether it is the source or an account of it; and verify that what you have found is current.

3. What should you infer when an official source appears to have vanished? That it has moved rather than that it is gone. Official sites migrate, so links in older writing die, and the correct response is to find the new location rather than to fall back on a secondary source.

4. Name four things to record when you find a source, and why. The citation, at the moment of finding, because the commonest cause of a lost source is assuming it will be easy to find again; where it was found and when, because official sites move; a copy of the text actually used, because a page may change; and a search log, because it prevents repetition and allows the methodology chapter to be written honestly.