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Free Legal Research in India:Filling the Legal Thirst

A free legal search engine: The Indian Kanoon search engine (about).

Furthering the Free Access to Law Movement (about which you can read much more at the Cornell LII blog post Accessible Law):

... the Cornell Legal Information Institute (LII) brings us a fascinating blog post: Indian Kanoon: The Genesis and the Legal Thirst:

From Robert Richards, Editor in chief, VoxPopuLII:

?In his post, Dr. Sinha identifies as the principal goal of Indian Kanoon the ?empower[ment of] citizens? by enabling them to become informed about ?their rights and privileges? under the law.

Dr. Sinha observes that the number of visitors to Indian Kanoon is extremely large and steadily rising; and that the average visitor to Indian Kanoon spends substantial time viewing each retrieved document. Dr. Sinha concludes that these data indicate a growing demand among the Indian people for access to the law ? a demand he calls "The Legal Thirst" ? and considers possible causes for this increasing demand.

Dr. Sinha suggests that two factors in particular ? the provision of access to law free of charge, and improvements in search technology, including ?forgiving? keyword search functionality and the ranking of results by relevance ? are fueling the desire of the Indian public to read the full text of the laws that govern them.

Dr. Sinha?s post will be of interest to legal information systems developers, legal publishers, the ICT for development community, and all those interested in the free access to law movement?.? (Link to full LII post.)

(Thank you to Robert Richards, Editor in chief, VoxPopuLII for the information!)

Full post as published by Oregon Legal Research on March 20, 2011 (boomark / email).