The Punjab and Haryana High Court sits at Chandigarh and serves Punjab, Haryana and the union territory. It was constituted in 1947 as the East Punjab High Court at Simla and moved to Chandigarh in 1955.
Its building is Le Corbusier's, part of the Capitol Complex, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The court that hears Punjab's land, water and criminal cases sits in a building that is studied by architecture students worldwide.
Its pendency is among the highest of any Indian High Court. District courts across Punjab carry backlogs of years, and a land dispute can outlive the parties to it.
Punjabi is the official language of the Punjab courts at the district level, and the High Court works in English, which means a litigant's case is translated out of their own language on the way up.
Almost every unresolved question described on this site, the water, Chandigarh, Bargari, 1984, the land ceilings, is in one court or another and has been for a long time.
Its sanctioned bench strength has been raised repeatedly and has almost never been filled. Vacancy rather than filing rate is what most analyses put the backlog down to.
Its pendency is very large and land disputes, matrimonial matters and service cases make up most of it. A civil suit over land in Punjab is a matter of decades.
Court records are a historical source almost nobody uses. Property litigation from the 1950s contains the resettlement of 1947 in detail, family by family.