The Supreme Court in July set aside orders passed by the National Company Law Tribunal and the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal after finding that both relied on non-existent, AI-generated judicial precedents. The fabricated judgments were caught. But the more unsettling question is: how much isn’t?
This comes at a time when AI is already moving into the daily functioning of India’s judiciary. It is being used for vernacular translation of judgments, document scrutiny at the filing stage, and live transcription of proceedings. The High Courts of Kerala and Gujarat have introduced AI policies governing its use in the district judiciary, while the Supreme Court has circulated draft regulations for comment.The pressure to adopt these technologies is understandable. India’s judiciary faces enormous backlogs, and AI offers the possibility of reducing administrative burdens and improving efficiency. But that argument can conflate two different claims: that the status quo is unacceptable, and that AI will fix it without introducing harms of its own. The first is true. The second is unproven.
AI is also not a silver bullet for problems that are fundamentally systemic. Consider AI-driven translation. Making judgments available in regional languages can expand access for litigants who do not read English. That is genuinely valuable. But the Supreme Court has itself criticised judges for impenetrable legal prose. Automatically translating jargon-heavy judgments will not, by itself, make judicial decisions easier to understand.Technology often moves faster than regulation. In the justice system, that gap matters because errors are not merely technical failures. They can affect people’s rights and the outcomes of cases.
