The locator-not-source rule
A law report, digest, database entry, news item or machine output only locates an authority; the court's own order or judgment is the source. Nothing is cited, quoted or relied on from the locator, and a locator's own reference number is never cited in place of the neutral citation or the law report.
When this decides something for you
A legal news service reports a judgment under a headline and gives the case a reference number of its own. A database returns a summary with a citation. A model, asked for the law, returns a paragraph with a case name and a year. Each of these tells the professional that something may exist and where to look. None of them is the thing itself. The rule on this page separates the two, and it is the rule that would have prevented every entry in the Register of AI-fabricated authority in Indian proceedings.
The question
When a professional has found an authority through a report, a database or a machine, what has been found, and what remains to be done before it can be relied on?
The premise
An authority exists in exactly one form: the decision as the court recorded it. Every other form (a report, a headnote, a summary, a database record, a machine's paraphrase) is a description of the decision by someone else, produced for their purpose and carrying their errors. A description can tell you where the decision is. It cannot tell you what it says.
How it works
The rule has three parts.
Locate, then go to the source. A report or a search result is used to find the decision: its case name, court, date and citation. The professional then obtains the court's own copy (from the court's website, the certified copy, or an archived original) and reads it. Reliance is on what was read there, not on what the locator said was there. The headline is never adopted as the proposition; the headnote is never quoted as the holding.
Cite the decision, not the locator. The citation given is the neutral citation, and the report (Supreme Court Cases, All India Reporter, the official reports) where one exists, with the paragraph number of the passage relied on. A news service's or database's own reference number for the case is not a citation and is not given in its place, because it identifies the description, not the decision, and a court cannot go from it to the record.
Treat a machine's output as the weakest locator. A model's citation may be exact, approximate or invented, and the three look identical. It is a lead to be checked against the court's copy and nothing more; where the court's copy cannot be found, the authority does not exist for the purpose of the document, whatever the machine says.
The rule extends beyond decisions. A statutory provision is read from the gazette or the official consolidated text, not from a commentary's quotation of it. A figure from a database is cited with the database and the access date, because the number moves. A document is cited by its date and issuing office, from the archived original.
One case
Gummadi Usha Rani v. Sure Mallikarjuna Rao, SLP(C) No.7575 of 2026, Supreme Court of India, order dated 27 February 2026. The four decisions relied on by the trial court carried full report citations, volume and page, in the Supreme Court Cases; the High Court found they had been generated by artificial intelligence. Applying the rule, each of the four was a locator produced by a machine, and the one step that would have disposed of all four, opening the cited volume or the Court's own record, was not taken. The Supreme Court's characterisation of the result as misconduct rather than error follows from the same point: the failure was not one of judgment about the law but of not going to the source.
The rule
A report locates; the court's copy is the source. Read the source, cite the source, rely on the source. A locator that cannot be traced to a source is not an authority.
Not to be confused with
The rule does not disparage law reports or legal news; they are how authorities are found, and a practitioner who does not read them will miss the law. It governs what is done after finding. Nor is it a rule against machine research: a machine is a fast locator and may be used as one, on the condition that everything it locates is then read at source.
Provenance and method.
Where this was published
- Shivam Shukla
- AI for Indian Advocates: The Practitioner's Standard for Supervised Intelligence (2026)
- Part III
- Shivam Shukla
- The Power to Say No
- SSRN 7454698 (2026)
- verification notes
Changelog
- 2026-09-25, version 1. First published.