Legal Directions: Newsletter on International Legal Affairs by RMN Foundation. October 2018
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BYU Law Launches Legal Corpus Linguistics Technology Platform BYU Law, a leading national law school in the U.S., has announced the launch of its Law and Corpus Linguistics Technology Platform, including three new and historically significant corpora. This first-of-its-kind platform for the legal community aims to advance the field of law and corpus linguistics, a methodology that uses naturally occurring language in large collections of texts called "corpora" to help determine the meaning of words and phrases. The Law and Corpus Linguistics Technology Platform features a user-friendly interface offering the ability to search these groundbreaking corpora by terms and phrases with filters for year, primary author, genre (legal or non-legal document, court proceeding, speech, diary entry, novel, etc.) and source. The corpora also support collocation searches, which enable the user to gain powerful insights into word meanings and relationships between words.
Supreme Court of India Upholds the Validity of Aadhaar In its 1,448-page verdict delivered on September 26, the Supreme Court of India observed that the national identification scheme Aadhaar is needed in the country, as it empowers the underprivileged sections of the society. Upholding the validity of Aadhaar in a four-one majority judgment, the court allowed the use of Aadhaar for access to government welfare schemes. However, it put certain limitations on the use of Aadhaar biometric data collected from more than one billion citizens of India. Now Aadhaar will not be mandatory for bank accounts, mobile phone connections, and school admissions. The court judgment added that citizens will have to link Aadhaar number to their PAN (Permanent Account Number) for filing tax returns. The court’s verdict came in response to 27 petitions that had challenged the validity of Aadhaar. The bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra pronounced that Aadhaar would be voluntary, while the users will have the option to exit. According to the judgment, no person will be denied the benefits of social welfare schemes even when their Aadhaar details are not authenticated. It is said that Section 57 of the Aadhaar Act 2016 which allows private companies and third-party entities to collect Aadhaar data to provide consumer services has been struck down as unconstitutional.