ecourts

This is a information retrieval toolkit to fetch case information from the ECourts Service. This is primarily meant for journalists, and law researchers who need bulk access to the ECourts website to get orders, judgements, or lists of cases that match their criteria.

The final goal is to cover all services under the ecourts.gov.in domain, but it currently supports a few services covered at https://hcservices.ecourts.gov.in/ecourtindiaHC/.

It covers all the High Courts and their various benches.

† - Optional

Case Types

Each of the individual courts use their own numbering system for various case-types. So the same type of case might have different ID depending on the court. This can even vary between various benches of the same High Court. For example, HCB (Habeas Corpus Petition) is numbered the following different ways across various courts (not exhaustive):

As such, before doing any kind of work that relies on case type (such as fetching case details, or orders by case type) - you must get the relevant case type idenfiers. You can run:

ecourts get-case-type --state-code SC [--court-code CC] to get the case type identifiers for a particular court. If the state-code/court-code identifiers are not provided, the case types will be fetched for all known courts. A list of all known courts is available at courts.csv published as part of the source code.

Act Types

Similar to Case Types, Act idenfiers are different between courts. You can use

ecourts get-act-type --state-code SC [--court-code CC] to get the act type identifiers for a particular court.

Types

The primary two classes that most users will deal with are Court, and ECourt. A court is one of the high court benches covered at https://hcservices.ecourts.gov.in/ecourtindiaHC/, and an ECourt is the primary class that deals with the website.

Other entities involved are more legal in nature:

• Case
• CaseType
• ActType
• FIR
• Hearing
• Objection
• Order - An order or judgement in a case.
• Party - Either a petitioner or a responded to a case.
• Court
• ECourt APIs are also documented.

Documentation

• Canonical link for the project is https://captnemo.in/ecourts/.
• General guidance is available via ecourts --help or ecourts cmd --help.
• Python documentation is available at captnemo.in/ecourts/src.
• Coverage reports are published at Coveralls.

Guiding Principles

• Make it easy to fetch case information.
• Store information in accessible formats, for easy retrieval and querying.
• Use standard identifiers, such as ISO-3166 for state codes.
• Be nice to the ecourts website. Retry failed requests, but do not hammer the site. In case of 5xx errors, wait for a while before retrying.

Citation

If you use this for any research purposes, please use the following citation information.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13324986

You can check various citation formats on the Zenodo Website or on GitHub by clicking "Cite this repository". Since this is a dynamic software - it depends on the ecourts website, please cite the Zenodo ID 13324986 as it will always point to the latest version of the software.

LICENSE

Licensed under GPL3-or-later. If you run this code, you are responsible for the legal implications of the same. The tool is intentionally single-threaded, and does not offer any parallelism. This is to avoid overloading the ecourts website servers, which are already quite slow. Please note sections 15-16 of the LICENSE, which are summarized here:

There is no warranty for the program, to the extent permitted by
applicable law. In no event unless required by applicable law or agreed to in
writing will any copyright holder, or any other party who modifies and/or
conveys the program as permitted above, be liable to you for damages,
including any general, special, incidental or consequential damages arising
out of the use or inability to use the program.

As part of GPL3 obligations:

You may copy, distribute and modify the software as long as you track changes/dates in source files. Any modifications to this code must also be made available under the GPL along with build & install instructions.