A Story of Suo Motos, Judicial Activism, and Article 184 (3)

TL;DR

This paper analyzes over a decade of Supreme Court judgments from Pakistan using Big Data techniques to identify judicial activism, revealing the judiciary's focus on public interest and fundamental rights.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Big Data analysis pipeline for unstructured legal documents to study judicial activism in Pakistan since 2009.

Findings

Judiciary actively pursues public interest cases.

Case bench size and citations help classify judgments.

Highlights challenges in applying Big Data to legal open data.

Abstract

The synergy between Big Data and Open Data has the potential to revolutionize information access in the developing world. Following this mantra, we present the analysis of more than a decade worth of open judgements and orders from the Supreme Court of Pakistan. Our overarching goal is to discern the presence of judicial activism in the country in the wake of the Lawyers' Movement. Using Apache Spark as the processing engine we analyze hundreds of unstructured PDF documents to sketch the evolution and various organs of judicial activism in Pakistan since 2009. Our results show that the judiciary has indeed been pursuing matters of public interest, especially those that pertain to the fundamental rights of the citizens. Furthermore, we show how the size of the presiding bench in a case and citations of Articles from the Constitution and prior judgements can aid in classifying legal judgements. Throughout the analysis we also highlight the challenges that anyone who aims to apply Big Data techniques to Open Data will face. We hope that this work will be one in a series of community efforts to use Open Data as a lens to analyze real-world events and phenomena in the developing world.