The advent of Google or other internet search engines has certainly made access to information much easier than what it was when people like me started our legal practice. Of course, before Google, it wasn’t as if it took lawyers weeks and months to cull out information for building their arguments in a case. There were other systems that were in place to source information, like the SCC journals and research digests. Particularly for lawyers practising in the Supreme Court or the high courts, these digests were of great help because whatever precedents or reference mat­erial we were looking for was available in them. Since law, unlike ­science, is not a universal subject and is ­jurisdiction-specific, lawyers did not need to wait endlessly to get foreign research journals. In any case, the frequency with which foreign judgments or foreign law needed to be quoted was far less then than it is now. Yes, for trial court judgments, access would be more difficult, but then we wouldn’t need these for every case in the higher courts.

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