Law Reporting in India

Every writ, every case name, every 'as held in' this paper has used — Kesavananda Bharati, Cossijurah, Nandkumar — is something you can only know because someone, somewhere, wrote the judgment down, printed it, and kept it findable. That unglamorous act of publishing decisions is called law reporting, and without it the entire doctrine of precedent this Constitution runs on would simply have nothing to stand on.

In two minutes

Law reporting is the systematic publication of court judgments, and it is what makes the doctrine of precedent workable in practice — from Sir William Macnaghten's Sadar Diwani Adalat reports in the early nineteenth century, through the High Courts' official reports after 1862, to the Indian Law Reports Act, 1875 that gave official law reporting its modern, government-authorised form.

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