The society

The idea of a legal resource center was formed on 10.01.1982, after the difficulty of locating even a well-known authority — Ujjam Bai v. State of U.P. — in printed reports made the need for a systematic record painfully clear. The Center was later registered as a society in 1994, under the Societies Registration Act, 1860, as recorded in contemporary press coverage published on the present site.

Its founding concern remains straightforward. Traditional tools — printed reports, digests, manuals and notes — are cumbersome when case law, statute law and commentary have to be read together. The Center set out to organise that material so that it could be retrieved accurately, not only searched as unstructured text.

From a card index of about 11,000 cards in the mid-1980s, the work moved onto early computer databases and, on 07.11.1996, to one of the early legal websites in India, inaugurated by Hon’ble Mr Justice M.M. Punchhi, then a Judge of the Supreme Court of India. Products developed in those years included Locator, Dial-N and SPOTLAW, and later the LAWINC ’98 CD-ROM. The present domain, law-inc.in, is recorded on the existing site as having been launched on 10.01.2007.

The founder and President is Aruneshwar Gupta. A fuller biographical note is on the People page.

The letter of 28.08.1989

On 28.08.1989, Hon’ble Mr Justice E.S. Venkataramiah, Chief Justice of India, wrote accepting an invitation to release software on Indian Laws processed by the Law Information Centre at the Indian Law Institute, New Delhi, on 14.09.1989 at 4.10 p.m.

The letter is addressed to Mr Aruneshwar Gupta, Hon. Co-Ordinator, Law Information Centre, India, B-20 Greater Kailash Part I, New Delhi 110048. The wording of the letter uses the earlier spelling “Centre”. The Greater Kailash address is historical; the current administrative office is on the Contact page.

The software was released at the Indian Law Institute on 14.09.1989, as accepted in that letter. This is treated as a founding milestone of the Center’s work.

Milestones

  1. The idea of the Center is formed.
  2. Letter from Hon’ble Mr Justice E.S. Venkataramiah, Chief Justice of India, accepting the invitation to release the software on 14.09.1989 at 4.10 p.m.
  3. Release of the software at the Indian Law Institute, New Delhi.
  4. The Center is registered as a society.
  5. Launch of the Center’s first website, inaugurated by Hon’ble Mr Justice M.M. Punchhi.
  6. The Economic Times reports the launch of Locator, “India’s first legal electronic directory,” created by the Law Information Center.
  7. The Lawyer, London, notes the country’s first Internet legal directory under the title Law Information Centre (Lawinc).
  8. Business India, “Making it Easy,” profiles the work and the LAWINC ’98 CD-ROM (some 680 record books).
  9. Launch of the present domain, law-inc.in, as recorded on the existing site.

Press and applause

The Center’s own “Applause” page collected contemporary press. The following are taken from that archive, and are recorded here as history, not as current publicity:

  • Business India, 06.04.1998–19.04.1998, “Making it Easy.” It took Aruneshwar Gupta five hours in 1982 to locate Ujjam Bai v. State of U.P.; the profile describes the later LAWINC ’98 CD-ROM as a comprehensive package of law-related study, then priced at Rs. 11,000.
  • The Economic Times, 25.12.1996, “The long arm of the law grabs the net.” India’s first legal electronic directory, Locator, launched on the Internet by the Law Information Center, with a site intended to include press cuttings, articles, a database of Indian legislation and legal information for the public.
  • The Lawyer, London, 07.01.1997, “India who’s hits Internet,” on the launch of the country’s first Internet legal directory under the title Law Information Centre (Lawinc).
  • The Asia Pacific Legal 500, 1997 edition, listed among the press collected on that page.

A 2009 note on the existing site looked forward to structured (not merely free-text) global judgment and statute databases, and to e-judiciary as a necessary development.

Activities

A fuller account of current activities will appear on the Activities page as the Center supplies dated notices. Historical products — Locator, Dial-N, SPOTLAW, LAWINC ’98 — and the 1996 website launch are recorded here so that the society’s work is not reduced to a blank “current news” column.