Context: The Chief Justice of India (CJI) has announced that the Supreme Court will adopt a “neutral citation system” for its judgments.

About “citation”

• A case citation is essentially an identification tag for a judgment. Typically, it would contain a reference number, the year of the decision, the name of the court that delivered that judgment, and shorthand for the journal publishing the judgment.

What is a neutral citation?

• A neutral citation is a form of citation where courts assign a unique sequential number to each decision.

• This would assign its own citation — distinct from those given by traditional Law Reporters.

• Law Reporters are periodicals or annual digests that publish judgments, often with an editorial note to make it accessible for lawyers to refer to precedents.

• For example, for the landmark Kesavananda Bharati case, the citation in ‘Supreme Court Cases’, a journal published by the Eastern Book Company, is (1973) 4 SCC 225.

• In the All India Reporter (AIR), the citation is AIR 1973 SC 1461.

Why is a neutral system excellent or necessary?

• Judgments mention citations while referring to precedents and often use citations from different Law Reporters.

• With artificial intelligence (AI) enabling the translation of judgments and transcribing of court proceedings, a uniform citation is necessary.

• Several High Courts including Delhi High Court have started a neutral citation format.

• The Delhi HC neutral citation is, for example, in this format: No-YEAR/DHC/XXXXXX

Significance

• The objective is to enable people to identify cases and text in them by reference to a single, unvarying reference, no matter the medium of publication.

• So all 30,000 judgments are going to have neutral citations.

• First tranche will be till January 1, 2023, then the other tranche will be till judgments from 2014 and then finally we will go back to 1950.