Lucknow: Even as a teenager, Surendra Malik knew that the family legal publishing business was where he would would end up.
“My father and uncle built this institution brick by brick,” he says. “Interaction with lawyers, barristers, judges, professors suited their temperament. From then on, it was a great inspiration for me to read and learn about the law and that became part of the family culture.”
Malik is talking about the Eastern Book Co., which his father and uncle jointly set up in 1942. Today, Malik’s company is still little known, at least outside the profession, but is an essential building block of India’s legal landscape.
It is thanks to Malik that legal practitioners have easy access to case law in India, dating back to 1950 as well as judgements of the Privy Council, the apex court during British rule. In short, 61-year-old Malik is the person responsible for the rows of tan coloured volumes of Supreme Court cases that invariably line up any self-respecting lawyer or judge’s chambers.
Expert insight: Eastern Book Co.’s Surendra Malik. His company offers a set of 264 volumes of the reports of Supreme Court rulings with more than 30,000 judgements from 1969. (Harikrishna Katragaddda/Mint)
The concept first took root when Malik was doing an undergraduate programme at the Law Faculty of Delhi University. In the three years (1966-69) Malik noticed that neither students nor teachers had access to case law. Instead, the focus was on studying the law as it existed without the advantage of studying how it had been practised.
At the same time, his professors had begun to experiment with teaching law based on actual court judgements, recalls Malik. Soon, he was assisting teachers in preparing study material on case law as there was nothing readily available.
“After three years of analysing Supreme Court judgements, I learnt how to analyse and find the law,” notes Malik.
Malik then left for New York to complete his Master’s in law from Columbia University.
On this return, he found lawyers were cyclostyling Supreme Court orders and directions while maintaining personal registers of names and numbers of past cases to aid their legal research.
Quickly passing up an opportunity to join the profession as a practising lawyer, Malik decided to immerse himself in the family business and began compiling and editing books, trademarked as Supreme Court Cases.
“There were some publishing houses that were reporting court judgements but they were a year or two late,” explains Malik. At the same time, he discovered that new subjects of study were emerging in law. For instance, when the legislature created numerous laws, following pro-labour measures and land reforms, it led to an addition of new terms in the legal lexicon. Malik says he also realized that there was lack of uniformity in the index system of the journals and the cases were classified in a haphazard manner, making legal research complicated and time consuming.
