A Discourse of Precedents within the Indian Income Tax Domain

We discuss precedents in this discourse. We outline their importance in the legal realm. We look at the ways in which they can be extracted from a judgment. Further, we propose a database architecture for storing this data. We also identify whether a particular precedent is merely mentioned, followed and subsequently relied upon, distinguished, or overruled in a particular case. We delineate the implications of each of these cases, and analyze the results over a large corpus of cases. Some interesting statistics are discussed. This discourse concludes with a thorough analysis of how they come in to play within the Indian Income-Tax domain.
The extraction algorithm can be extended to other entities which point to a citation, like lower case details(lower court details is the information about the case's history i.e. where it was litigated before being appealed in the current court. A case can travel across courts in its litigation cycle).
We will also demonstrate how certain constituents of any given case, for example its issues and arguments, can be shown to have a relation to its precedent.

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