ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN THE INDIAN JUDICIARY: REVOLUTION OR RISK?

Somewhere in a courtroom of Chandigarh asking a chatbot about bail jurisprudence and the Supreme Court of India comparing fake AI generated case laws to the Bhopal gas leak, Indian law kind of ended up in a story it never really asked to join. And no, that’s not just me being dramatic it is, pretty much word for word, how the Supreme Court described the risk of AI hallucinations getting inside judicial reasoning: invisible, insidious and catastrophic, by the time anyone catches it. As a law student I did not grow up thinking that courts were places where technology moves quickly, or moves fast at all. Courts are supposed to be slow, deliberate, almost stubbornly human. And yet, in the space of about three years, Indian courts have gone from curiously experimenting with ChatGPT in a single bail order to actively drafting a national regulatory framework for how artificial intelligence may and may not be used in the administration of justice. That arc, compressed and dramatic, is really the whole story of "Revolution or Risk." It has been both, often in the same case. This piece tries to walk through that arc honestly as what AI is actually doing inside Indian courts today, what has already gone wrong, how the judiciary has responded, and what all of this might mean for someone like me, who will (hopefully) be practicing law in a system that is rewriting its own rules of engagement with machines while I am still a student.