Book on SC definitions is a runaway hit
The Supreme Court during the past 60 has defined complex constitutional and statutory provisions to lay down the principles for strengthening democracy and governance through the rule of law. But it was not an easy task to locate the correct “legal explanation” of a particular word or phrase buried in the heap of thousands of All India Reporters (AIR) and the Supreme Court Compilations (SCC) on the judgments delivered by the apex court.
The father-son duo — T.L. Garg and Rohan Garg — advocates have come out with a solution by bringing out a two-volume compilation on over 40,000 words, phrases and legal expressions defined by the apex court during past six decades. The compilation makes tracing of the “legal meaning” of a particular word or phrase in the AIRs and SCCs a matter of few minutes while, otherwise it would have consumed hours of lawyers and researchers.
T.L. Garg, an advocate of nearly three decades standing, who also had been reporting for several international news agencies and journals on important judicial pronouncements, came out with the idea to bring out a book of this nature after he himself faced difficulty in locating the correct legal meaning of a particular world or phrase while functioning both as a lawyer and a journalist. His son Rohan with a LLM degree from a foreign university chipped in to assist the father in his efforts. “It took 20 years for me to be able to make the compilation,” the senior Garg said.
The book works very simple — the words are compiled in alphabetical order with short meanings and also mentions the number of particular AIR or SCC volume with reference to the page which contains the defined explanation. The next thing one has to do is just to pick up that particular AIR or SCC from the library and open the referred page and find the desired meaning. The whole exercise takes a few minutes. Justice D.K. Jain of the Supreme Court has described the book “a unique legal encyclopaedia comprising words, phrases and legal expression that would serve as a ready reference for entire legal fraternity as well as people in vocations other than the law.”
“Perhaps it is for the first time that any author has incorporated legal expressions in addition to the words and phrases to which new or additional interpretation have been given by the apex court,” Justice Jain said. He said by putting the entire collected data on sequential form in an alphabetical order enabled the users to “instantly” locate the relevant case law for their understanding and usage.
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