README.md

metadata

language:
  - en
license: other
task_categories:
  - text-generation
  - text-classification
  - text-retrieval
tags:
  - legal
  - law
  - india
  - supreme-court
  - court-judgments
pretty_name: Supreme Court of India Judgments (1950-2025)
size_categories:
  - 10K<n<100K
configs:
  - config_name: default
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: supreme_court_dataset.jsonl

Supreme Court of India Judgments Dataset (1950-2025)

Dataset Description

This dataset contains a comprehensive collection of judgments and orders from the Supreme Court of India, spanning from its inception in 1950 up to early 2025.

Dataset Summary

• Total Documents: 26,688
• Total Tokens: ~196.9 Million (counted using cl100k_base encoding)
• Format: JSONL (JSON Lines)
• Language: English
• Time Range: 1950 - 2025

Data Fields

Each entry in the .jsonl file contains:

• text: The full-length text of the judgment.
• metadata:
  • source: The original PDF filename.
  • year: The year the judgment was delivered.
  • path: The relative directory path in the original source structure.

Example Instance

{
  "text": "Chanan Singh Son Of Kartar Singh vs State Of Haryana...",
  "metadata": {
    "source": "Chanan_Singh_Son_Of_Kartar_Singh_vs_State_Of_Haryana_on_2_April_1971_1.PDF",
    "year": "1971",
    "path": "1971/Chanan_Singh_Son_Of_Kartar_Singh_vs_State_Of_Haryana_on_2_April_1971_1.PDF"
  }
}

Dataset Creation

The dataset was compiled by extracting text from digitized versions of Supreme Court judgments. The documents are organized chronologically by year.

Applications

This dataset is intended for researchers and developers working on:

• Legal NLP: Precedence search, citation analysis, and legal reasoning.
• Text Summarization: Generating concise summaries of long legal documents.
• Classification: Identifying case types, statutes, or legal themes.
• Large Language Models: Fine-tuning models on formal Indian legal English.

Considerations & Limitations

• Source Accuracy: The text is extracted from PDFs; while generally accurate, minor OCR or extraction artifacts may exist.
• Sensitivity: This data consists of public court records. Users should ensure their use cases comply with ethical standards and regional data privacy regulations.
• Legal Advice: This dataset is for informational and research purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.

License

The judgments of the Supreme Court of India are public records. Under Section 52(1)(q)(iv) of the Indian Copyright Act, 1957, the reproduction or publication of any judgment or order of a court, tribunal, or other judicial authority does not constitute an infringement of copyright, unless the reproduction or publication is prohibited by the court or authority.