Supreme Court releases draft neutral citations for 10,000 judgments between 2014 to 2023

The Supreme Court of India on Thursday releases a draft list of 10,000 of its judgments from January 1, 2014 to March 31, 2023 with neutral citations..The list was released as an exercise of crowdsourced checking, so that any missing or incorrect items can be addressed with the help of legal professionals and publishers. The notice has asked for inputs for the same within 15 days to be sent to the Registrar of the top court's Library and Editorial Section."We solicit invaluable suggestions on the proposed list of cases and the referral neutral citations. One may compare the list of cases and neutral citations with their own database and accordingly make suggestions regarding any missing or incorrect data, if any, in the list of judgements ... on consideration of suggestions received, a final list of judgments with neutral citation will be published by the Registry," the notice said.As of the now, the citations are of 12 characters each and one example is follows: 2014:INSC:176..The announcement regarding such neutral citation was first made by Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud in open court in February this year.The neutral citation will be for all the judgments delivered by the Court and will be done in three phases, he had said.The first tranche, which includes judgments starting from 2014 till present, has already been completed. The second tranche will be from 1995 to 2013 and the third from 1950 to 1994.The CJI had stated that the Court is employing machine learning tools to translate its judgments from English to vernacular languages.The Neutral Citation as introduced is designed to be the Supreme Court's approved system of citation, which would be independent of Law Reports or other publications, and unique to each decision.Every order and judgment (reportable and non-reportable) of the Supreme Court will now have a citation of its own, thereby facilitating easy identification, referencing, and retrieval of cases.Access to such citations will be available for free to all.In November last year, the Supreme Court had constituted a three-member panel of High Court judges to develop and implement a uniform and unique citation for judgments.The Delhi, Kerala and Madras High Courts have already introduced neutral citations for their judgments..[Read notice]