Indian Kanoon - Search engine for Indian Law

Free features

Structural Analysis of a Judgment

Every document on Indian Kanoon that is longer than 5 paragraphs will have a table on top to segment the document under the categories - Facts, Issues, Arguments by Appellant, Arguments by Respondent, Precedent Analysis, Analysis of law, Court's Reasoning and Conclusion. The structural analysis dashboard allows you to select categories of the order you are interested in.

It is a machine-learned model which automatically segments a document into the above-mentioned categories for user convenience. You can select "Mark Above Structure" which automatically marks various segments of the judgment in different colors, or you can select individual categories for reading only the selected portion. This saves your valuable time while reading lengthy texts and helps in efficient analysis!

Reliability of Precedents

Every document on Indian Kanoon that consists of case laws citing within it will have a feature on top that will extract all the discussion around that case law and categorize the opinion of the court. The categories for labeling a cite-text are - Relied by Party, Accepted by Court, Negatively viewed by Court and No clear sentiment. You can "Mark all Cite Text" which highlights all cited text in the document along with its sentiment or you can select one of the categories. This helps immensely for identifying quickly the precedents matching your needs!

Judges filter (Author and Bench) and Tag Search

Now you can filter your search results by judges. You can also select Author or Bench and have additional law-based filters to focus on judgments of your interest. With further filters based on "Court Type", "Year", "Document type" and "Related queries", your research potential will be unmatched!

We have successfully resolved 2200 judges that includes all Supreme Court judges and also all the High Court judges post 2008. We hyperlink court judgments that the judges have authored or were part of the bench. Along with this we editorially created tags for all major laws of India and court judgments.

Advanced Search

Please watch the video below on how to use the advanced search and the various options available to control your search.

Word and Phrase search: Indian Kanoon allows you to look for words and phrases in the main document text and in the title of documents. Some words that you may like to search are freedom of speech, murder, copyright infringement, proclamation of emergency, reservation for other backward class, reservation in private colleges, and sexual harassment. For phrases, enclose a set of words by quotation marks. For example, in order to search for phrase freedom of speech in the document/title text, you need to type "freedom of speech" in the document/title text box.

Operators: Besides phrase search, words can be combined by ANDD, ORR and NOTT operators. So a search for 'murder ORR kidnapping' will search for documents that have either the word 'murder' or the word 'kidnapping'. Similarly, a search for 'murder ANDD NOTT kidnapping' will look for documents that have the word 'murder' but not the word 'kidnapping'. ANDD is implicit when used with a series of words. So 'murder kidnapping' is effectively 'murder ANDD kidnapping'. Note that the operators ANDD, ORR and NOTT are case sensitive and require at least one space at both start and end.

Restricting search by document types: By default, Indian Kanoon will query all documents and try to find out the most appropriate section/article, subsection or sub-subsection to a particular query. However, Indian Kanoon may sometimes give you irrelevant results. In this case, you can narrow your result set by selecting only the set of documents that you are interested in.

The document selection allows you to target your query to only a narrow set of documents. A law passed by the Parliament of India is divided into section/article, subsection and sub-subsection. For example, Constitution of India will be available as the complete document, articles like Article 19 (protection of certain rights), subsection as Article 19(1) (all citizens have the rights) and sub-subsection as Article 19(1)(a) (freedom of speech and expression).

Restricting search by date: Normal search will look for documents on all possible dates. You can restrict the dates by going to advanced search and changing the from date and to date. If one of them is left unchanged, from date defaults to minimum possible date and to date defaults to maximum possible date.

Title and Citation Search: A search in the main box will automatically query the titles and the citations (like "1977 AIR 1579"). The documents with title and citation match will surface to the top. However, if you want to restrict the search to only documents that match words or phrases in title, you can use the "title:" filter. For example, to only look for documents that have kesavananda in the title, you can type "title: kesavananda" in the main search bar. Similarly, to search only for documents that have 1993 AIR citation, you can use "cite: 1993 AIR".

Author and Bench search: You may also want to look for documents written by a particular judge. To restrict to judgments that are written by a particular judge, you can use the "author:" filter. For example, to look for judgments written only by Arijit Pasayat, type "author: arijit pasayat" in the main search box. Similarly, the "bench:" filter allows you to restrict judgments that have only the given judge in the bench. For example, to find judgments in which "Arijit Pasayat" has been on the bench, type "bench: arijit pasayat" in the search box.