Many lawyers and law students still do not know about eSCR project by the Supreme Court. Some know about it but do not know how to use it.
Supreme Court Reports (SCR) is a caselaw reporter like popular AIR, SCC etc. SCR is Supreme Court’s official reporter unlike the latter which are private publications.
SCR has published more than 35000 reportable judgments delivered by the Supreme Court along with headnotes (1950-2023). Recently, the Chief Justice of India launched a website through which one can freely access digital copies (pdf) of all these 35000+ judgments reported by SCR. This means that almost every important judgments delivered by the Supreme Court along with headnotes can be downloaded from eSCR.
How to search by case name in eSCR
For example, if we are searching for the case “Maneka Gandhi vs Union Of India” in eSCR.
- Go to judgments.ecourts.gov.in
- Type Maneka Gandhi as the keyword in the box and fill in captcha and click search. Please note that wrong spelling of case name will not give correct results. So just google the case name and ascertain correct spelling and then only start searching in eSCR.
- A page will open with a list of judgments that contains the phrase ‘maneka gandhi’ in it.
- Just above the first judgment, we can see ‘show 10 enteries’. Click on it to make it ‘show 1000 entries‘. By now we might have got every judgments that contains the phrase ‘maneka gandhi‘ in it
- Scroll down to the last judgment.
- Normally, the last judgment in this list will be the judgment we are searching for. In some cases, we might have to check out a couple of last judgments to get the correct result.
How to search by SCR citation in eSCR
For example, we want to get a judgment with citation ‘[2013] 14 S.C.R. 713’
- Go to judgments.ecourts.gov.in
- Just keep the keyword blank and fill in captcha and search.
- A page will open that will contain all the 35000+ judgments reported by SCR.
- On the right side of this page, we can spot ‘Citation Year’. Click on ‘show’.
- Select year as 2013, then select volume as 14
- A page which contains a list of judgment published in ‘[2013] 14 S.C.R. ‘ will open. Show ‘1000’ entries and then just browse through the results to find Lalita Kumari judgment reported at page 713.