The Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh High Court has held that judicial officers must independently verify any citations, legal propositions or precedents generated through artificial intelligence platforms before incorporating them into judicial orders, cautioning that the ultimate responsibility for the correctness and authenticity of a judgment rests solely with the authoring judge.
Justice Wasim Sadiq Nargal made the observations while dismissing a petition filed by the Principal and academic supervisors of Woodland House School challenging an executing court’s order directing compliance with an interim direction to pay 50% salary to a terminated employee. The Court upheld the execution order and imposed costs of ₹25,000 on the petitioners for what it described as repeated attempts to delay compliance with binding judicial directions.
Rejecting the school’s contention that an interim order passed under Order XXXIX Rules 1 and 2 CPC could not be executed, the High Court held that Section 36 CPC extends the execution mechanism applicable to decrees to judicial orders as well. It further clarified that proceedings under Order XXXIX Rule 2-A for disobedience of injunctions are supplemental and do not exclude the remedy of execution.
The Court also expressed concern after discovering that the trial court had relied on incorrect and, in one instance, untraceable judicial citations while deciding the matter. The Court observed that reliance on judicial precedents requires accurate, authentic and verifiable citations and cautioned against paraphrasing the ratio of judgments instead of reproducing the relevant extracts.
Acknowledging the growing use of AI-based legal research tools, the Court observed that while such technologies may assist legal research, they cannot substitute judicial scrutiny. It directed that every citation, extract or proposition of law obtained through AI platforms must be independently verified from authentic sources, every precedent must carry a complete and accurate citation, and wherever a precedent forms the basis of a finding, the relevant extract should, as far as practicable, be reproduced verbatim.
