Paper Info
Title
A Story of Suo Motos, Judicial Activism, and Article 184 (3).
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.
Year
Venue
Field
2015
CoRR
Open data,Constitution,Supreme court,Public interest,Sociology,Judicial activism,Information access,Fundamental rights,Law,Big data
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1502.03772
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
2
1
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zubair Nabi1235.77