 So, this is basically a journey, and I would like to take you on this journey, and hopefully by the end of it, maybe you also have some ideas to, you know, how you can at your community's crowdsource data sets, see this way or maybe other ways. So, yes, I am from India, hopefully next CSV config can have many more people from India, but yeah, it's a big country as all of you know, and there are 36 states. This is like how the administrative setup looks like. Now, this is the map of the country and there are 36 states, and each state is further divided into districts, and there are, so in total there are 765 districts in the country. This is how the judicial setup looks like. Like you have the top court or the highest court of land, which is the Supreme Court. Now that operates at a country level, and then you have high courts. Now, every state, you can imagine one state, one high court, but there are 25 high courts and there are 36 states. So, for some high courts, deal with two to three states, and then there are at the lowest level, you have a district court, which is for day-to-day matters, so every district will have a court. So, yeah, so let's first look at the topmost court, like there are 34 judges at the Supreme Court, and this is as on 31st March of this year, and on an average, so this is the number of cases they kind of closed per year between 2019 and 2021, and I think two of them were like COVID years. So, you can imagine this number to be a bit high on the higher side, not on the lower side. So, on an average, they are closing close to 30,000 cases on an year. At the high courts, we have 785 judges, and they close per year close to 1.5 million cases. So, a lot of cases, and now at the district court level, there are 672 district courts. This is the scale is massive, there are 19,000 judges, and they close close to 15 million cases. Now, it looks like a big number, 15 million, but it's not even, maybe 1% of our population, so it's not like a lot. So, yeah, so when you see that, you know, look at how important each judge is if they are dealing with and closing so many cases, but do we have, like how are the immediate question is, how are these judges appointed? So, let's start with the district court, which is at the lowest level. So, it's like a very simple process, there's an examination you apply, you go through the examination, and if you get selected, so it's like there is no subjectivity there. High court, now high court and supreme court, now here is where we have a lot of subjectivity because there are senior judges, and the senior judges have collegium, and the collegium decides who gets to be the next judge. I think this is simple, yeah, so this is where the subjectivity, I'm audible, okay, okay, yeah. So, we will focus especially on high court because supreme court still, there are only 35 judges, and there is a lot of coverage around supreme court, people know who gets to become a judge, but high court, there isn't a lot of coverage, they are, you know, very important at a state level, and there is a lot of subjectivity involved here. Now, let's understand how this appointment system has evolved over the year, so 1950s when the constitution, you know, we had like a written constitution, then in 1990, till 1993, the process of appointment was very political in nature, and this is when I'm talking to, about supreme court and high court judges, yeah, so it was highly political, and caste, religion, and political affiliations played like a massive role, and in 1993, a judgment by the supreme court kind of changed everything, and they're like, no, we don't want the executive to be involved, we will, you know, deal with our own processes, we will kind of ensure who gets to be a judge, we don't want any political connections here, so 1993 changed, and till now we are following what is called the collegium system. Now, it was meant to be non-political, but there is a lot of politics involved, so how this works, this is like a very easy way to understand it, so whenever there's a vacancy, and there's always a vacancy, the chief justice, which is like the head of the high court, you know, they know about it, they then kind of tell them, tell about the vacancy or inform about the vacancy to the chief minister of the state. Chief minister then works with, so this is also where a lot of, sorry, yeah, this is also where, you know, the executive is involved, so the chief minister knows about it, governor knows about it, then they will kind of write to the law minister, which is at the union, country level. Now, the law minister will work, this is where the collegium will decide that, you know, there is a vacancy in one of the high courts, they will come up with, let's say, four or five names, then the law minister, law ministry and collegium system will decide, okay, whether these judges can be appointed as high court judges, then law ministry finally sends a recommendation to the prime minister, the prime minister then sends us to the president, then further gets approved, it is like a very long process and we always have a shortage of judges, but this is how it works currently. And analyzing judicial appointments, has it happened before? So these are books, books have been written, so this is the first one and this is all supreme court judges, right? So a person named Rajiv Dhawan along with Alice Jacob, so they analyzed supreme court judges between 1950 to 1975 and I think most of these were done using interviews, qualitative interviews. Another study happened, this one is also very popular, it's between 1950 to 1989, a study of 93 judges, but after 1989, there wasn't anything and you remember the process change in 1993, so then this particular study was done by Abhinav Chandrachur and for 96 judges and the hypothesis of what he wanted to test was, has there been like, we have 30 years have been passed since the inception of the collegium system, but has it produced like a legitimate, efficient or a diverse judiciary than what we had before? Yeah, but all of these studies were done for supreme court judges, none for high court judges. So now, even if this is the question, even if, you know, so how can, is there data, there is, so when it comes to judges, there is no government database because executive is not involved, no public data maintained by judicial departments as well and judges are also exempt from sharing information. This is, if I have a right to information request back there in India, like freedom of information, so judges are exempt to form sharing information there as well. The only documented source of information about the judge is a profile page on a court's website. Yeah, so this is how it looks like and this, this profile can be two lines or can be 100 lines, there is no standard. I took this from a couple of different high court websites and you can see, you will find a few details like date of birth and, but nothing else. Yeah, so what you can inquire about the judge from like five lines or a paragraph, but this is like the only source right now. And a study was done to check how many, like percentage of judges who are disclosing their educational details or about their educational background and you can see that only 9% of the judges disclose their graduation specialization. Year of law degree only maybe 23%. So it's not even like 50% who are disclosing anything or everything. Similarly, now this is very important disclosing professional details. What were they doing before becoming a judge? Were they part of the judiciary? Were they, you know, a lawyer for a private firm? Were they doing something else? But no one discloses it as you can see. And this study is there on SSRN, you can check. Yeah, so there's a lack of data. We don't have anything, profiles lack a lot of details. Religion and cast play like a massive role in India as well, but again, no information on that as well. So will we ever have access to reliable data about a judge? That was the question. But it all started, so I am part of this team called Civic Data Lab and we got a great opportunity to build like an open data platform. Now for such initiators, we can curate many more important data sets around law injustice. And we got the opportunity in 2019 during COVID, we developed this platform and in 2021, we launched the Justice Hub. Now Justice Hub, it's like a community of lawyers, legal researchers, you know, anyone who is associated with the law and justice ecosystem is not just like an open data platform. So we want to work with people to curate data, where they can come share that data and anything related to law and justice. So this is how the platform looks. After the platform was launched, we kind of reached out to people who were working on such data sets and we had the first data for justice meetup. What we also wanted to do was we call this date with data. Date with data basically means like let's say if you are, you have some data related to law, you know, anything around law and justice and you have shared that on the Justice Hub, we will invite you where you can talk to the community about how you curated that data site, etc. And there's a community engagement through which you also get a lot of feedback. So we call this date with data. So our first date with data was organized and we invited Professor Rangin Tripati to talk about these three data sets which kind of he created and there are other data sets also which he wanted to speak about. And this is where the whole conversation in this particular webinar conversation started about judges appointments. Someone asked that, you know, these particular data sets only talk about the Supreme Court judges. Why don't we have any data for High Court judges? And he said that, you know, it's like a very resource intensive process. So what can we do? So someone like, oh, can't we just collaborate and curate? And I think that is where it all started. So we launched summer of data, like Google summer of code, we call it summer of data. And the objective was, again, working with a lot of law students because every year for a couple of months, they don't have like a lot of work to do. So can we work with them and curate these data sets? So between May and July 2021, we designed this program where we wanted to collect data from 25 High Courts, 40 students, and there were a total of 43 variables. I'll quickly go through this. So for one High Court, we assigned a couple of maybe two, three students. They collected data, then we had some automated processes to check that data and some manual processes where the professor was checking the data and giving them feedback. This I will skip just for the lack of time. So now this is a very important slide, how we validated data. So for every judge, we ensured that there are more than two to three data entries per judge. So then what we used to do is we created like a data processing engine and you can see this is like a judge. And then you have, there are 10 variables and wherever entries match between like let's say three students are collecting data for this judge. If the entries are matching, we assign this color. If they don't match, we assign this color. If let's say one of the students have collected the data but others haven't, we assign this color. So there were a few rules. So and we automated this process because there were like a lot of judges. And these were our students who data curators. We worked with close to 40 students I think, across law universities in India. And these were the mentors who helped them. Because these were law students and they weren't very familiar with anything related to data collection at all. We invited people from the community who worked on, who have kind of did similar work before. So to talk to students and we had these talks during the three months that we had. And the data sets were finally published on the Justizab and we called it Koj. Koj is a Hindi term but in English you can think about it as search. I think it's in Spanish it's Busqueda. So this is right there on the Justizab right now. This is one of the data set spaces. There are 26 data sets. Why 26? One is for the country and 25 for the country. The 25 data sets have been merged into one. We have removed all the duplicate judges etc. And another great story happened. We found a professor at the university he works in. There was a convocation. The Chief Justice of India was invited and we created this guidebook and we kind of informed them and they launched the data set through the process. So this again was a co-incident, happy co-incident that happened that the judges launched the data set themselves. And this is the discourse around the data set that because there isn't anything that existed before and now you have a data set of 1700 judges. So a few things you can you know analyze and we have close to 43 variables. Education details, professional details, all of that. And now we are working on coach 2.0 because the data set was updated till 2021. I think March 2021. We will update it on hopefully this Constitution Day which is on 26th November 2023. So looking forward to it. And lastly can we use this like what are some of the important ingredients here? So we have an anchor kind of community which is the Justizab. The mentors have played a very important role. Then obviously you have student community and the processes through which the community work to curate this data. Anything you feel is missing here. Like if we have to do this next. Obviously the funds. So yeah hopefully we will be able to replicate some more of data and create many more interesting data sets. And yeah thank you. This is where all the slides are. Thank you. Thank you very much for that great talk. We do have time for questions. We have about four or five minutes. We have one in the back. Thanks so much for your talk. That was really interesting. I'm just curious were there any surprises that you found in the analysis of the data? There were a few. Actually we have so if you go to this link we have a few data tables there. So one of the things with judges appointment in India is we don't we see a lot of lawyers who are appointed as judges and not judges from the lower judiciary who are getting appointed as judges. That is one. And again we don't have a lot of details about their professional background. So you know there's a mismatch there. When it comes to women lawyers getting appointed as judges that's also being very rare. Religion and caste were two variables which we were not able to find it online anywhere and we also just wanted to rely on authentic sources but I am sure that will play like a massive role there. Some students also looked at matrimonial websites. So one thing we did was so let's say if I am from a state from a southern state in India I will be responsible for the southern for a high court in that state. So I can I know about how the surnames are there family names are there and what is the religion and caste and some of them I just looked at matrimonial websites and see okay where but we don't want to rely on that information but yeah it's just lack but there will definitely be a few correlations there and yeah. This is super interesting thank you so much for your work. Did any judge engage with you were there judges who were like really great and every data point could be matched and you were like can you work with us? Yeah so we for I think a few high courts we I think one of them was madras which is like the southern state a lot of judges the profiles were filled. See there is no law which is required and there's no standard. We have been in touch with past judges because now they are not part of the judiciary anymore and they are kind of very helpful and supportive but yeah that is how it is. But some judges do maintain like a detailed profile but some of them just do. I have a question. Have you written up some recommendations for how the judges should describe themselves and their profiles now? Yeah so the paper I was showing where we were looking at how many judges have disclosed their educational details versus so a paper has been written but again it's like you don't know these initiatives have been very ad hoc but now since we have something to base our arguments on so that is the next step and with coach 2.0 we would like to kind of come up with a recommendation as well. Amazing well let's give you another round of applause.