📢 Announcement - We’re starting Season 2 of the Justice Hub Data Dialogues 🎉

Analyse judicial productivity using data from eCourts, legal system reforms, empirical overview of the Supreme Court of India

One of the core objectives of the Justice Hub is to empower more people from this community to understand and solve justice problems using data.  With that in mind, we started these dialogues in 2022 to create a space for our data contributors to share their journey and experience using diverse use cases of legal data and shed light on their research workflows.

Now, we’re back with more, come join us. 

These sessions help us demystify the data-driven research processes and make it easier for people to engage in constructive dialogue. We hope to learn more from the diverse practitioners in the legal community. These discussions will be hosted online on Zoom and are open to all. 

In the past, some of these discussions have led to new collaborations and projects. KHOJ (Know your High Court Judges) was one such dialogue, that led to collaborative curation of the background details for more than 1,700 High Court Judges. 

For the first dialogue of the season, we are inviting Varsha Aithala, Srijoni Sen and Anushka Sachan to discuss their recently published paper titled - Illuminating Judicial Productivity in India's District Courts: An Empirical Analysis (You can find their paper on SSRN and Justice Hub).  

Here are a couple of reasons why you should not miss this discussion:

1. Learn to use e-Courts data. The authors have used the judicial data published by DevDataLab for their analysis.  While the challenges in curating/using data from eCourts are well known, this paper shows us an effective method to by-pass a few of the challenges. We would like to discuss and learn from the authors some tips and tricks, which can help us save time and effort when using this dataset. 

2. Learn about the methodologies employed by the authors to identify and evaluate factors that affect judicial productivity in lower courts and the significance of these findings. 

Past Dialogues

In season one of Data Dialogues, we've discussed Judicial Appointments, Supreme Court Workload, Migrant Crisis, India Justice Report, and Navigating the Judiciary's RTI maze. You can watch these discussions on YouTube or head over to the Data for Justice archive to read a summary of these discussions. 

New dataset on the Justice Hub

We have collated some of the important questions, which came up during the recently concluded monsoon session of the parliament. The topics include cases pending before the constitutional bench, state wise number of cases settled through mediation centers in the last 5 years, cases dealt through virtual courts and details about the number of people who received legal aid services. These documents are now available on the Justice Hub. 

Updates from the community

1. Court on Trial - A data driven account of the Supreme Court of India - The book by Aparna Chandra, Sital Kalantry, William H.J. Hubbard was launched last month. For further insights, check the paper titled The Supreme Court of India: An Empirical Overview of the Institution and a lecture by Prof Hubbard delving deeper into the empirical analysis conducted for this research.

2. The XKDR Forum is organising a monthly seminar series on Indian Legal Systems Reforms. They plan to cover a diverse array of topics, across legislative matters, the role of data and technology in courts, measures of court performance, access to justice, and litigant perspectives in court interactions, among others. The videos for the first two sessions are available on their youtube channel. The upcoming session is on September 8, for which you can register here. 

3. Another interesting update from the OpenNyAI team, who are working on Jagrit, which is a voice companion (or a bot) that answers citizens' queries with reliable legal information, in their vernacular language. It uses existing Large Language Models (LLM's) and vetted legal information, to generate text and audio answers in Hindi, Kannada or English. Here is an announcement post and a preview video to see the tool in action. 

If you would like to share your work with us, or know someone who we should invite for Data Dialogues, do add a comment here or write to us at info@justicehub.in. 

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