PESHAWAR: The Peshawar High Court has directed the federal and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa governments to respond to a petition against the All Pakistan Legal Decisions Publishers (PLD Publishers) seeking orders for rectifying the omission of footnotes from judgements and orders it publishes in law reports.

A bench consisting of Justice Ijaz Anwar and Justice Mohammad Naeem Anwar declared that the federal and KP law secretaries and the chief executive of the PLD publishers should file comments about the petition of Barrister Asadul Mulk within a fortnight.

The petitioner said the PLD Publishers, established in 1947, was the largest legal-publishing house in the country that published the leading law-reporting journals and textbooks of Pakistan that were almost universally used in the legal profession, and had been so used for over 60 years.

Mr Mulk contended that the omission to incorporate footnote in law reports, particularly in digital form, ran counter to the ethos of Section 3, 5 and 6 of the Law Reports Act, 1875, as the said provisions of law envisaged the publication of judgements and order of Superior Courts in Pakistan, and not their partial or selective publication.

Justice Ijaz observes he, too, has noticed such errors, wonders why they continue to occur

He submitted that as per Article 94 of the Qanun-i-Shahadat Order, 1984, presumption of correctness was attached to law reports, and this presumption would dissipate if publishers were allowed at will to omit to incorporate footnotes.

He argued that “footnotes often cited judicial precedents or law books or law journals to support the conclusion drawn.

“Footnotes also provide parenthetical information, background information, judicial reasoning or judicial evaluation of the competing theories, so to exclude them from law reports would be to deprive the Courts and lawyers of valuable information,” he said.

Barrister Mulk referred to Section 2(9) and (14) of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, and explained that on the civil side, judgements and orders had been defined in such a way as to create no room to exclude footnotes from the definition of judgements or orders.

He argued that on the criminal side, Section 367 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1898, defined judgements in such a way as to obviate the possibility of excluding footnotes either. These definitions, he said, stood in harmony with the definition of judgements and orders laid down in Black’s Law Dictionary.

The petitioner argued that the omission adversely affected the administration of justice, infracting upon Article 10-A and 19-A of the Constitution, which guaranteed the right to fair trial and right to information respectively.

He said the modern day style of writing was such that often theratio-decidendi (reason for the decision) is captured in footnotes, so the omission of footnotes from law reports was bound to muddle the meaning of the judgements or orders and obscure the ratio-decidendi pronounced by the Supreme Court or high courts.

Mr Mulk said it was imperative that such unauthorised and unsanctioned omissions were obviated and directives were issued to set the omission at naught.

Justice Ijaz Anwar observed that he, too, had noted the omissions over the years and wondered why they continued to occur.

Published in Dawn, October 19th, 2025