Phase one · building the corpus

Digitising Uganda's law, judgment by judgment

Decades of decisions are public but not usable — scanned pages with no consistent citation, no structure a machine can read, and no record of what later courts did to them. Every judgment is acquired, cleaned, segmented and linked. That corpus is the asset; the product is what sits on top of it.

As the record exists today

SCANNED · PAGE 14 OF 31 · NO SEARCHABLE TEXT

…in the premises, the learned trial judge
was correct to hold that an oral vari-
ation of the agreement was binding on
both parties, notwithstanding clause 9
thereof. I would accordingly dismiss
the appeal with costs to the respondent.

No paragraph numbers Citation format varies OCR errors uncorrected Nothing links to it

→ Ingest
Clean
Link

As Prima stores it

[2011] UGCA 14 · Court of Appeal Machine-readable

¶ 45Holding on the construction of clause 9 of the agreement.

¶ 46Finding that the variation was communicated and acted upon.

¶ 47The proposition itself — an oral variation binds both parties.

¶ 48Costs to the respondent.

Stable citation Retrievable by meaning Cited by 9 later judgments Treatment tracked

Acquire

Judgments gathered from courts, registries and the open-access record — including decisions that were never reported.

Read

Scanned pages put through correction until the text is faithful to the judgment, not approximately like it.

Structure

Each judgment segmented to the paragraph and given a stable identifier, so an answer can point at one line.

Link

Citations inside judgments resolved to the judgments they refer to, turning a pile of documents into a graph.

Verify

Trained legal readers confirm what each later court actually did — followed, distinguished, doubted, overruled.

The law is already public. Making it usable is the work nobody has finished.

Design concept · illustrative record