Responsibility conditioned on office, not authorship
Responsibility for a professional or judicial act attaches to the office of the person who performs it, not to the authorship of the words. The judge who signs an order owns every citation in it whoever typed them; the advocate who files a pleading owns every authority in it whatever produced them. Supervision, not authorship, is the unit of responsibility.
When this decides something for you
An order is challenged because an authority in it does not exist, and the judge says a research assistant supplied it. A firm is asked to explain a fabricated statutory quotation and says a junior accepted what the software produced. A regulator's adjudication order is set aside for citing cases that were never decided, and the officer says the tool wrote the draft. In each case the person is making the same argument: that responsibility follows the hand that typed. This page states the rule that answers them, and the instruments that now state it too.
The question
When a machine, a junior or a clerk produced the words, who is responsible for what the words assert?
The premise
A judgment is an act of the judicial office. A pleading is an act of the advocate's office. A penalty order is an act of the adjudicating officer's office. Each is made by the signature of the person holding the office, and the signature is what gives the document its force. Nothing else in the document's history has any legal effect; the assistant's draft, the model's output and the clerk's typing are not acts of anyone. It follows that responsibility for what the document asserts cannot lie anywhere but with the office that made it an act.
How it works
The doctrine says responsibility is conditioned on office, not on authorship. Three things follow.
Authorship is irrelevant to responsibility. It was always so: a judgment drafted by a law clerk was the judge's; a pleading settled by a junior was the signing counsel's. The machine changes the volume and the fluency of the drafting, not the location of responsibility. An argument that "the tool wrote it" is an argument that the signatory did not perform the office, which is a confession, not a defence.
Supervision is the unit of responsibility. The office-holder answers for what was supervised, and the question in any inquiry is what supervision consisted of: whether the material was framed, verified and judged by the person who signed. A signature over unsupervised material is a signature over nothing, and the act it purports to make may be no act at all.
The consequence attaches to the office-holder as such. A judge who relies on a fabricated authority has not made an error of law; the law was never consulted. An advocate who files one has not misjudged a precedent; the precedent does not exist. Both have failed to perform the office, and the response is the one that failures of office attract: disciplinary, not appellate.
One case
Vijay Ghanshyam Gadiya v. Union of India, 2026 INSC 947, Supreme Court of India, order dated 2 September 2026 (Datta and Nagu JJ). An Additional Commissioner of Customs imposed a penalty of Rs.425,27,99,100 by an Order-in-Original of 8 October 2025 that relied on judgments and articles which the Court, verifying them itself, found to be non-existent, falsely cited, or existing but not holding what was attributed to them. The Court set aside the order and the High Court's confirmation of it, remanded the proceedings to an officer of the same rank other than the author of the order, and at paragraph 11 left it "to the wisdom of the appointing authority to initiate such action against the author of the order dated 8th October, 2025, as may be warranted in the circumstances". The remedy was directed at the office-holder by name of office, and the machine is nowhere in it.
The same rule is now in the draft instrument for Indian courts. Regulation 8(1) of the Supreme Court's draft Regulations for Use of Artificial Intelligence in Courts, 2026 (published for consultation on 3 June 2026) provides that accountability for all decisions made by any officer with the assistance of AI "shall rest exclusively upon such officer", and that neither the output of the system, the opacity of a black-box model nor the occurrence of hallucination may be invoked "as a ground for avoiding accountability". Regulation 43(6) provides the same for the party or representative who submits AI-assisted material: full responsibility, and no reliance on the character of the AI output as a defence.
The rule
The signature makes the act, and the office answers for the act. Whoever or whatever produced the words, the person who signed owns them; the only question is what that person did to deserve the signature.
Not to be confused with
The doctrine does not say that a judge or advocate must write every word. Delegated drafting is as old as chambers. It says that delegation transfers labour and never responsibility, and that a machine is one more delegate whose work the office-holder must supervise before signing.
Provenance and method.
Where this was published
- Shivam Shukla
- From Authorship to Supervision
- doctrine note (2026
- unpublished; the formulation is the author's)
- Shivam Shukla
- The Power to Say No
- SSRN 7454698 (2026)
- section 8
Changelog
- 2026-09-25, version 1. First published.