Artificial Intelligence in Indian Courts: Due Process and the Constitutional Limits of Judicial Decision-Making

Abstract

The India’s courts labour under one of the largest case backlogs in the world, and the promise of artificial intelligence to help clear it is correspondingly seductive. Yet the same technology that can transcribe a deposition or translate a judgment can also, in other hands, score a defendant’s dangerousness or predict the outcome of a case, and the constitutional stakes of the two uses could not be more different. This article distinguishes assistive judicial AI from decisional judicial AI and asks where the Constitution requires the line between them to be drawn. It argues that the right to a fair trial under Article 21, the guarantee against arbitrariness under Article 14, the settled duty of courts to give reasons, and the requirement that a person adversely affected be heard together entail a constitutional baseline that no automated system may cross, namely that the decision, and the reasons that justify it, must remain the work of a human judge. Measured against that baseline, India’s present trajectory is largely sound, for the tools deployed so far, from SUPACE and SUVAS to live transcription, are assistive rather than decisional, and the Kerala High Court’s 2025 policy and the Supreme Court’s 2025 White Paper have expressly confined AI to administrative, research, and translation functions while insisting on human verification. The danger lies not in present design but in future drift, as the pressure of pendency tempts the system toward opaque, biased, or outcome-predictive tools, and as automation bias threatens to reduce the human in the loop to a rubber stamp. Drawing on the cautionary experience of risk-assessment algorithms abroad and the emerging classification of judicial AI as high-risk, the article proposes a constitutional framework of human-in-the-loop decision-making, transparency and contestability, bias auditing, and a uniform national standard, to hold the line that India has so far rightly drawn