BARE ACT READING (BASIC TIPS)

Probably you all know what a bare act is. But, many law students and even new lawyers sometimes get a bit confused due to some technicalities while reading a bare act. Let us take a bare act for better explanation. So, here I have taken this Consumer Protection Act, 1986, which obviously means that this Act was passed in 1986. But, do you know, what does this mean? 68 of 1986…. It means that this was the 68th Act which was passed by the Parliament in the year 1986. As amended by The Finance Act, 2017, and same here too….like it was the 7th Act which was passed by the  Parliament in 2017. Along with the 12th report, etc…. These rules and regulations are also included in this act. Whenever you read a Bare Act, first go through the index, so that you can navigate to the exact section. And many times you will get answers to certain questions in the index itself.

Then after reaching out to the page on which the section which you were looking for is located, you will get all the details of that section. Here you will observe that along with the text there are brackets, and numbers in small fonts are written beside those brackets. The meaning of which you will understand when you will read the footnotes. In the footnotes, you come to know what amendments have taken place with that particular act till now. The substitutions, omission, insertion of certain provisions…. everything is mentioned in the footnotes. (to understand it in more detail, watch the video above.) Apart from this, I would like to say that the language in these bare acts is not so easy, so if you did not understand it once then read it multiple times slowly in order to understand the correct meaning. Just keep a dictionary app open on your mobile so that you can quickly search the meaning of any word you don’t know. You can also break the sentence for easier understanding. And if you are good in Hindi or some other language then buy the bare act in that language or get that bare act in that language as well as in English…both. So, that you can easily compare and understand. Because understanding the exact meaning is more important. If you don’t understand properly then you mess up your matter. One last tip I would like to give is that if you are using some bare acts very frequently, then you can just mark some keywords of a particular section or write something there in your own words. So that, when you just look at the markings you come to know about the section and there is no need for you to read the section. So guys, if you liked this blog post then share it video with your friends.