LiveLaw Paywall: How to Read LiveLaw Premium Articles for Free

LiveLaw is the site Indian lawyers, law students and court reporters refresh during a Supreme Court hearing. It reports judgments and orders from the Supreme Court and the High Courts as they are pronounced, often within the hour, and its explainers on new sections of the criminal code are widely cited. It is also a subscription business. A large share of its reports are marked premium and stop at a prompt to subscribe, which is frustrating when you have followed a link to a single judgment. This guide explains how the gate works and how to read a full LiveLaw story.

How the LiveLaw paywall works

LiveLaw uses a freemium model with a metered element. Short news items and some top stories are free. Detailed reports of judgments, analysis pieces and most of the columns are marked premium, and a non-subscriber sees the opening paragraphs before the body is replaced by a subscription prompt. Some premium stories can be opened a few times a month before the gate closes; the allowance is not published.

The gate is applied in the browser. LiveLaw depends on Google for much of its traffic, since people search for a case name or a section number, so the complete text is delivered in the page HTML for indexing. A script then hides it from readers who are not signed in. A crawler-style reader that never runs that script receives the whole report. This is the same arrangement Law.com uses for the American legal press, and our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls describes the mechanism.

Our tests on 30 September 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 999-word LiveLaw report on the Supreme Court's directions in its own-motion case on public safety after the Delhi rapes loaded in full, all 25 paragraphs.
• A 1,094-word LiveLaw explainer on the Supreme Court's reading of the new deceitful-promise-of-marriage offence loaded in full, all 22 paragraphs.
• A 670-word LiveLaw service-law report on whether a probationer's service is deemed confirmed loaded in full, all 11 paragraphs.

Read a LiveLaw article in full

• Copy the article link. LiveLaw links look like livelaw.in/top-stories/headline-slug-ID, and the High Court sections follow the same pattern.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The report appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and body text, including the quoted passages from the judgment.

Other approaches

• The judgment itself. LiveLaw usually links the order or judgment PDF at the foot of a report, and the same document is free on the Supreme Court and High Court websites and on the eCourts services.
• Student and institutional plans. LiveLaw sells discounted subscriptions to students and to law schools and firms, which is how most regular readers get access.
• Newsletters and social feeds. The free daily round-up and the site's feeds carry the headline and the gist of each report.
• Private windows. Where a story is metered rather than locked, the count is kept in a cookie, so a private window resets it.

How it compares with other legal and Indian titles

LiveLaw behaves like Law.com, the American legal trade site, which also loads in full. Among Indian news sites, the Times of India, including its TOI+ court explainers, and Mint both work. Bar and Bench, LiveLaw's main rival, was not tested. The full list of sites that work is kept up to date.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

LiveLaw is a small newsroom that pays reporters to sit in court every day, and subscriptions are what fund that. If you are a practising lawyer or a student who reads it daily, a subscription is inexpensive and is the honest way to keep it running.