Justice B.V. Nagarathna specifically highlighted that she encountered a reference to a fictitious case titled Mercy v. Mankind while hearing a Public Interest Litigation (PIL). [...] in September 2025, the Delhi High Court saw a petition withdrawn in embarrassment after the opposing counsel exposed the citations as completely fabricated. The petition even went so far as to invent phantom paragraphs from the landmark "Raj Narain v. Indira Nehru Gandhi, (1972) 3 SCC 850" judgment, heavily quoting paragraphs 73 and 74 from a ruling that only contains 27 paragraphs in reality.
Curated from livelaw.in · 17 March 2026 →
Two of the Indian cases that led to the Supreme Court's ruling. In February 2026 a bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant raised AI-drafted petitions being filed without anybody checking them, and Justice Nagarathna said she had been handed a case that does not exist. Five months earlier a Delhi High Court petition had quoted paragraphs 73 and 74 of a 1972 Supreme Court judgment that runs to 27 paragraphs, and was withdrawn once opposing counsel checked. That is the harder version of the failure and it recurs across these cases: not an invented case, which a search will disprove, but invented text inside a real one, which only somebody who opens the judgment will catch.
