Editorial Standards

Our sources

Every case on LexStreak is built from the primary judgment as delivered by the Court — the authenticated copy or the neutral-citation text. We do not paraphrase secondary reporting. Each case page reproduces the judgment and, where available, links the original PDF so any reader can check us against the source.

Verification before drafting

Extracted text passes an automated fidelity gate before any headnote is written. The gate checks that the reproduced judgment is complete and faithful to the source — no dropped paragraphs, no garbled characters, no truncated, merged or split passages, and no broken paragraph numbering. Text that fails the gate is quarantined for review rather than published.

Use of AI

LexStreak uses AI tools to assist extraction, structuring and drafting. AI is an aid, not the author of record. Every headnote, answer and summary is checked against the source judgment before publication, and nothing is published that has not cleared the fidelity and audit gates. Where confidence in an extraction falls below threshold, the case is held for review rather than released.

Grounding and verifiability

Each proposition in a headnote or answer is tied to the paragraph of the judgment it comes from, so a reader can verify every statement against the Court’s own text. Key passages are reproduced verbatim from the judgment, extracted programmatically rather than retyped.

Faithfulness over embellishment

We report what the Court held, in the Court’s own sense. We do not add commentary the Court did not make, and we mirror only the anonymisation the Court itself applied — we neither add masking nor remove it.

Open data and attribution

Part of our archive is built from the text of judgments as printed in the Supreme Court Reports, and our Madras High Court reporting from the eCourts High Court judgments corpus, both as published on the Registry of Open Data on AWS — the Indian Supreme Court Judgments dataset maintained by Dattam Labs, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. We take the judgment text and the case metadata, and nothing else. The headnotes, the “Issue for Consideration” notes and the other editorial matter printed in the Reports are not reproduced here, and from 25 August 2026 we no longer link to or serve the Reports’ own PDF files — where we show a Supreme Court judgment’s original PDF it is the Court’s own file from the Supreme Court website. Reproduction of a judgment or order is permitted by section 52(1)(q)(iv) of the Copyright Act, 1957; that permission covers the judgment itself, not a law report’s headnotes. Every headnote and Point of Law on LexStreak is written by us.

Which High Court judgments we report

The Supreme Court marks its own judgments REPORTABLE and we follow that mark. The Madras High Court makes no such mark — in the week we calibrated on, only 36 of 3,941 judgments carried a filled-in “Index : Yes” and the rest left the registry template untouched — so we decide it ourselves, and we publish the rule. A judgment is reported when the Court marked it for the index; or when it quashes a Government Order, notification or rule, questions the validity of a law, refers a point to a larger Bench, decides a point of first impression, frames a substantial question of law, or issues general directions. We do not report orders directing an authority to consider a representation, withdrawals, dismissals for default, compromises, adjournments, interim orders, or the follow-on orders that simply apply a judgment already reported. Connected matters that share one judgment are reported once. The full rule set, and the numbers it produced, are published in the repository as docs/madras-hc-reportability.md.

Independence

Our selection and summarisation of judgments are not influenced by any party to a case, by advertisers, or by any outside interest.

Not legal advice

LexStreak is a legal-awareness and study product. Our headnotes and answers are not legal advice and do not substitute for reading the judgment or taking professional counsel.