From Bound Volumes to Open Records: Where Pakistan's Case Law Is Heading

For most of the history of legal practice in Pakistan, case law arrived in bound volumes. Monthly parts came in, were bound into annual sets, and took their place on the shelves of chamber libraries and bar rooms. A judgment was known by where it was printed: a year, a series, a page. That system did real work. Before anything could be searched, someone had to choose which judgments mattered, edit them, write the headnotes and build the indexes, and the law reports did exactly that for generations of advocates.

The shelf is no longer the only place a judgment lives. The direction of travel is clear, and it is worth stating plainly where it should end.

What has already changed

Every one of the superior courts now publishes judgments on its own portal. Some have gone further and begun to cite their own judgments in their own name. The Lahore High Court gives judgments a citation of its own, in the form 2024 LHC 6088, printed beside any law report citation the same judgment may carry. The Sindh High Court does the same in its own form. A citation of that kind points at the court's own record rather than at a page in somebody's volume.

The law was ready before the technology was. The Copyright Ordinance 1962 already provides that reproducing or publishing any judgment or order of a court is not an infringement of copyright, unless the court itself prohibits it. A judgment has never been anyone's private property to keep.

Where others have taken it

Other common law systems have already walked this road, and they arrived at the same place.

England and Wales introduced neutral citations, issued by the courts themselves, in 2001. In 2022 The National Archives opened Find Case Law, a public service where judgments of the superior courts are published as an official record, searchable by anyone. In 2023 the Supreme Court of India opened its own electronic law reports to the public, and set to work on neutral citations of its own. In the United States, the Supreme Court held in 2020 that no one can claim copyright in the work judges do as judges, restating a principle more than a century old.

Underneath all of it sits an idea set down in Montreal in 2002 by the legal information institutes of several common law countries: that public legal information is common property, and should be open to everyone, at no cost.

The case for the open record

A judgment is the state's own work. It is written by a public officer, in a public court, paid for by the public, and it binds the public. The record of it belongs to the Republic. It follows that every written judgment should be published in full by the court that issued it, indexed so it can be found, and given a stable citation in the court's own name, so anyone can trace any reference back to the source.

None of that is a criticism of the people who kept the record when no one else did. It is simply the right arrangement for the tools that now exist.

Where the value should sit

Once the text is open, holding it is no longer worth anything by itself. Whoever keeps a collection of judgments has to earn their place through what they build on top of it: search that understands a question rather than matching a phrase, connections between judgments and the provisions they apply, summaries that are checked against the source, and tools that turn reading into drafting. A lawyer will pay for that only if it saves time or improves the work, and that is exactly the test it should have to pass.

That changes what a legal database is. It stops being a gate in front of the source and becomes a gateway to a utility. The source stays where it belongs, with the courts, open to anyone, and the value moves to the work done with it.

The next chapter

The bound volume was the right answer for its time, and it served the profession well. The open record is the right answer for this one. The courts have started down that road, the law already permits it, and the systems Pakistan's courts most often compare themselves with have shown where it leads. What remains is to finish it: every written judgment, published by its court, citable in its court's name, and open to everyone who needs to read it.

For how our own case law database ties every judgment back to the court that issued it, see Decisions, Decisions: Our Case Law Database, or Why We Only Keep Full Written Judgments.