# Moot court research tools India: a mooter's research workflow **TL;DR:** A moot problem hands you a fixed set of issues and a hard memorial deadline, which makes moot research a scheduling problem as much as a substantive one. Most teams lose marks not on the strength of their arguments but on authority handling: wrong or outdated citations, cases that have been overruled, and a memorial that does not match the citation format the rulebook actually specifies. This guide covers the free-tier and subscription tools available to Indian mooters, how to build and verify an authority list against a deadline, and where teams most commonly bleed marks. --- ## On this page - [What makes moot research different](#what-makes-moot-research-different) - [Reading the proposition: extracting researchable issues](#reading-the-proposition-extracting-researchable-issues) - [Building the authority list](#building-the-authority-list) - [The free-tier reality for Indian mooters](#the-free-tier-reality-for-indian-mooters) - [College access to SCC Online and Manupatra](#college-access-to-scc-online-and-manupatra) - [Checking a case is still good law before it goes into the memorial](#checking-a-case-is-still-good-law-before-it-goes-into-the-memorial) - [Citation format in memorials: the rulebook wins](#citation-format-in-memorials-the-rulebook-wins) - [Building the compendium](#building-the-compendium) - [Oral round preparation from the same research](#oral-round-preparation-from-the-same-research) - [Where teams lose marks](#where-teams-lose-marks) - [The research-to-memorial workflow](#the-research-to-memorial-workflow) - [A pre-submission authority checklist](#a-pre-submission-authority-checklist) - [Frequently asked questions](#frequently-asked-questions) --- ## What makes moot research different A moot problem is not an open research question. It is a closed fact pattern with a defined set of legal issues, usually two per side, sometimes more, framed either directly in the moot proposition or left for the participating teams to frame themselves within the boundaries of the facts given. Ordinary legal research for a live matter can expand as new facts emerge from the client or opposing counsel. Moot research cannot. The facts in the problem are the facts you have, and the issues you frame at the start of your preparation are, in practice, the issues you will be arguing at the final oral round. That closed structure changes what good research looks like. In a live brief, breadth matters, because you often do not yet know which authority will end up mattering most. In a moot memorial, depth on a fixed issue set matters more, because every hour spent chasing a tangential argument is an hour not spent making sure the four or five authorities you actually rely on are correctly cited, correctly summarised, and still good law. The second structural difference is the deadline. A moot competition sets a memorial submission date that does not move for individual teams. Rulebooks vary on the exact mechanics, but the pattern across Indian moots is consistent: a released proposition, a clarification window in which teams can raise questions about the facts, and then a fixed memorial deadline after which no further submission is accepted. Judging a moot means reading dozens of memorials against the same fact pattern, and a judge who has read fifteen submissions before yours notices immediately when a citation does not check out, when a case cited for a proposition has actually been overruled on that exact point, or when the memorial cites a paragraph that does not say what the team claims it says. None of that requires special scrutiny. It falls out naturally from reading memorial after memorial on the same problem. This piece assumes you already know how to frame a legal issue and construct an argument. It focuses narrowly on the research workflow: how to convert a moot proposition into a researchable issue list, which tools are actually available to an Indian law student without an institutional subscription, how to [read a judgment carefully enough to cite it correctly](/blog/how-to-read-a-judgment), and where the research-to-memorial pipeline breaks down in practice. --- ## Reading the proposition: extracting researchable issues Before opening any database, read the moot proposition twice. The first read is for the story: who the parties are, what happened, and what relief is being sought. The second read is for the legal skeleton: every statute mentioned by name, every constitutional provision invoked, every prior proceeding referenced, and every issue the proposition itself frames, if it frames them explicitly. Most moot propositions do one of two things. Either they state the issues for determination directly, in which case your research question is already defined and your job is to find authority on precisely that question, or they leave the issues to be framed by the teams, in which case the first substantive task is issue-framing itself, done before any deep research begins. A team that starts searching case law before settling on its issues wastes time chasing cases that turn out to answer a question nobody asked. A useful discipline at this stage is to write out, in one sentence each, every legal question the fact pattern could plausibly raise, then narrow that list to the issues that are both arguable on the given facts and central enough to the outcome that a bench would expect them addressed. Issues that are legally interesting but tangential to the relief sought are candidates to cut, not because they are wrong, but because memorial word limits and oral round time limits force prioritisation. Once the issue list is settled, each issue becomes its own research thread with its own authority list, its own statutory provisions, and its own compendium entries. Treat the issues as separate research projects that happen to share a fact pattern, not as one undifferentiated pool of research. This is also the stage at which the applicable law needs to be pinned down precisely: if the fact pattern involves conduct that straddles 1 July 2024, work out whether the Indian Penal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure or their replacements, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 and the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, govern the relevant events, since the BNS, BNSS, and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 replaced the IPC, CrPC, and Indian Evidence Act with effect from that date. Our guide to the [new criminal law codes](/blog/new-criminal-laws-bns-bnss-bsa) sets out the section-to-section mapping if your problem straddles the transition. --- ## Building the authority list For each issue, the authority list has three layers, and building them in order avoids the common trap of citing a secondary source for a proposition a primary source states directly. The underlying discipline is the same one that governs research outside a moot court room; our [guide to a district court lawyer's research workflow](/blog/district-court-lawyer-research-workflow) describes the same layered approach adapted for practice rather than competition. **Primary sources first.** The relevant statutory text, the specific section or article, and the leading judgments that interpret it. If the issue turns on a constitutional provision, start with the text of the Constitution itself, available at [India Code](https://www.indiacode.nic.in), before reaching for a case that discusses it. For a fuller treatment of how primary and secondary sources differ and when each is appropriate to cite, see the guide on [primary versus secondary legal sources](/blog/primary-vs-secondary-legal-sources). **Case law second.** Search for judgments that have directly interpreted the statutory provision or constitutional article on the issue you have framed. At this stage the goal is coverage, not selection: gather every plausibly relevant judgment before deciding which four or five will actually appear in the memorial. **Secondary sources last, and sparingly.** Law review articles, textbook commentary, and Law Commission reports are useful for understanding how commentators have approached the issue and for identifying cases you might have missed, but a memorial that leans on secondary commentary instead of the primary authority it discusses reads as under-researched. Cite the case the article is discussing, not the article's summary of it, once you have located and read the case yourself. A practical habit that separates strong memorials from average ones: for every case on the authority list, note in one line what specific proposition it is being cited for, and the paragraph number where the judgment actually states that proposition. This forces you to read past the headnote and into the judgment text, and it means that by the time you draft the memorial, the pinpoint citation is already sitting in your research notes rather than something you have to hunt for under deadline pressure. The guide on [how to read and brief a judgment](/blog/how-to-read-a-judgment) covers how to locate the operative reasoning inside an Indian judgment's structure. --- ## The free-tier reality for Indian mooters Most law students do not have an institutional SCC Online or Manupatra login, or have one that is rate-limited, shared across a class, or accessible only from the campus network. The free layer of Indian legal research is therefore where most moot research actually happens, and it is worth knowing precisely what each free tool does and does not do. For a broader framework on weighing coverage, cost, and search quality before you commit research time to any one platform, see the [guide to choosing an Indian case-law search engine](/blog/choosing-indian-case-law-search-engine). **Indian Kanoon** ([indiankanoon.org](https://indiankanoon.org)) is a free full-text search engine covering a very large corpus of Indian court and tribunal decisions. Its strength for moot research is coverage and speed: full-text search across judgments, including many tribunal and lower-court decisions that curated commercial databases do not carry, with no subscription barrier. Its limitation is equally important for mooters specifically: it does not publish a citator or a good-law flagging system comparable to the overruled and distinguished flags maintained by the subscription platforms, so it will not tell you that a case you have found has since been overruled. Treat an Indian Kanoon result as a lead to verify, not a citation-ready authority. A fuller discussion of where Indian Kanoon's coverage helps and where it falls short sits in our [guide to Indian Kanoon's limitations for legal research](/blog/indian-kanoon-limitations-legal-research). **The eSCR portal** ([judgments.ecourts.gov.in](https://judgments.ecourts.gov.in)) is the official free judgment search maintained for Supreme Court and High Court decisions, searchable by case name, citation, court, and date. Because it is the courts' own portal, a judgment retrieved here is the authoritative full text, useful when you need to confirm exact wording or paragraph numbering before a pinpoint citation goes into the memorial. It is a document retrieval and search tool, not a citator: it will not tell you whether a case has been subsequently overruled or distinguished. Supreme Court judgments here also carry the neutral citation, covered in our [guide to eSCR and neutral citations](/blog/e-scr-neutral-citations), which is the citation form your memorial should generally lead with once a Supreme Court authority has one. **India Code** ([indiacode.nic.in](https://www.indiacode.nic.in)) is the Ministry of Law and Justice's free repository of Central Acts, including amendment history. For any issue that turns on statutory text, this is the source to check that you are citing the section as it currently reads, not as it read before an amendment. Some individual document links and PDFs on India Code do not resolve reliably outside a standard browser session, so if a specific section link fails, search the Act by name on the site directly rather than assuming the provision has been removed. None of these three free tools substitutes for the others. A realistic free-tier moot workflow uses Indian Kanoon for broad case discovery, the eSCR portal to confirm the authoritative text and pinpoint the paragraph of any Supreme Court or High Court judgment you plan to cite, and India Code to confirm the current text of any statute in play. --- ## College access to SCC Online and Manupatra Many Indian law schools provide institutional access to SCC Online, Manupatra, or both, though the terms, seat limits, and campus-network restrictions vary by institution and are set by each college's own licensing arrangement rather than by any uniform standard. Where that access exists, it is worth using for two things a free tool will not give you: editorial headnotes that summarise a judgment quickly, and a published citator flag. [SCC Online's](https://www.scconline.com) own product materials describe a visual flagging system in its help documentation, where a marked indicator against a case signals that a note or holding has been overruled, applied by the same in-house editorial process that produces its headnotes. [Manupatra's](https://www.manupatra.ai) own FAQ describes a two-tier flag system, a red flag for a judgment that is completely overruled and a yellow flag for one that is partially overruled, with SLP disposal tracked separately. Both of these are editorially maintained, meaning a person read the subsequent case law and applied the flag, which is a meaningfully different process from an automated citation graph. A fuller side-by-side of what each platform publishes about its own coverage, citator depth, and pricing is in our [comparison of SCC Online, Manupatra, and Indian Kanoon](/blog/scc-online-vs-manupatra-vs-indian-kanoon). If your team has institutional access to either platform, use it specifically for the good-law check on your final shortlist of authorities, even if the bulk of your discovery research happened on free tools. The editorial flag is not infallible and does not replace reading the subsequent treatment yourself, but it is a faster first pass than manually reading every citing case. Where institutional access is not available or is too seat-limited to cover a whole team through a research sprint, [Niyam](https://niyam.ai) is a plain-English search tool over a corpus of Indian judgments that can serve the same discovery role SCC Online or Manupatra would, though it is built on a smaller, curated corpus rather than the full commercial database, and the good-law check described in the next section still needs to happen against a primary source regardless of which discovery tool a team uses. --- ## Checking a case is still good law before it goes into the memorial This is the single step most likely to separate a memorial that survives cross-examination in the oral round from one that does not, and it is also the step most frequently skipped under deadline pressure. A case remains good law when it has not been overruled by a larger or superior bench, has not been reversed on appeal, has not been declared per incuriam, and has not been overtaken by a statutory amendment to the provision it interpreted. A memorial that cites a case for a proposition the case no longer stands for, because a later bench has overruled it on that exact point, is not a minor drafting slip. It is the kind of error a bench notices in the first thirty seconds of cross-examination, and it undermines every other authority the team cites afterward, because the bench now has reason to doubt the rest of the research. The verification routine that works under a moot deadline is short and does not require a paid citator. For every case on your final shortlist: 1. Confirm the exact citation and paragraph against the full text on the eSCR portal or, for High Court decisions, the relevant court's own judgment portal. 2. Search for the case name on Indian Kanoon and read the list of citing decisions, specifically the most recent ones, to see whether any later judgment has expressly disagreed with, distinguished, or overruled the point you are relying on. 3. If your team has SCC Online or Manupatra access, check the platform's own flag for that case before finalising. 4. Confirm the statutory provision the case interprets has not been amended since the judgment, checking the current text on India Code. This is the same discipline that applies in practice, not a moot-specific shortcut. The full mechanics of how Indian precedent loses force, including overruling, distinguishing, per incuriam findings, and statutory supersession, are covered in detail in the guide on [checking good law in India](/blog/good-law-checking), which is worth reading in full before your team finalises its authority list, not after. A [citator that flags whether a case has drawn adverse treatment](https://niyam.ai) in later decisions can shorten this check considerably when you are working through a shortlist of a dozen or more cases under time pressure, which is exactly the situation a moot deadline creates. Treat any such flag as a starting point rather than a final answer: it directs your attention to a case that needs a closer manual read, it does not replace confirming the point against the primary source on the eSCR portal. --- ## Citation format in memorials: the rulebook wins Every general guide to Indian legal citation, including our own, describes the settled conventions: neutral citations in the format year INSC number for the Supreme Court, round brackets for SCC, square brackets for SCR, no brackets for AIR, and a paragraph pinpoint rather than a headnote reference. The full mechanics are set out in the guide on [how to cite Indian judgments](/blog/how-to-cite-indian-judgments). For moot memorials specifically, one rule sits above all of that: the competition's own rulebook governs. Moot rulebooks commonly specify their own required citation style, footnote or endnote conventions, word or page limits that include or exclude footnotes, and formatting requirements for the table of authorities. These requirements differ from competition to competition and from year to year within the same competition, so this guide will not state a specific rulebook's format as settled fact. Read your specific competition's current rules document in full before drafting a single footnote, and treat any citation convention described in a general guide, including this one, as the fallback to use only where the rulebook is silent. A team that submits a memorial in a citation format that is internally consistent and legally correct, but that ignores the rulebook's specified format, has created an avoidable and entirely self-inflicted deduction. Assign one team member the specific task of checking every citation in the final draft against the rulebook's formatting requirements before submission, separately from checking that the citations are substantively correct. These are two different checks and both need to happen. --- ## Building the compendium The compendium is the bound set of the primary source materials, described in the earlier discussion of [primary versus secondary sources](/blog/primary-vs-secondary-legal-sources), statutes, and case law extracts, that a team submits alongside or brings to the oral round, so that the bench and opposing counsel can turn directly to the passage being relied on without searching for it independently. Rulebooks vary on whether a compendium is required, what it must contain, and how it is to be formatted, so check your specific competition's rules on this before assuming a standard practice applies. Where a compendium is required, build it as the research proceeds rather than as a separate task after the memorial is drafted. Every time a case makes the final authority list, save the relevant extract, typically the full judgment or the specific pages containing the paragraphs you cite, into the compendium file for that issue. Waiting until after the memorial is finished to assemble the compendium means re-locating every citation from scratch under worse time pressure than you had the first time. Two habits keep a compendium usable in the oral round rather than merely compliant on paper. First, tab or index it so that a specific citation can be located in seconds while a judge is asking a question, not minutes. Second, make sure every page extracted matches, exactly, the paragraph and citation given in the memorial's footnotes, in the format described in the [guide to citing Indian judgments](/blog/how-to-cite-indian-judgments). A compendium that does not match the memorial's citations, because the source was swapped out late in drafting without updating the corresponding compendium extract, creates confusion at exactly the moment a team most needs to look prepared. --- ## Oral round preparation from the same research The research done for the memorial is the same research the oral round draws on, but it needs to be reorganised for a different purpose. A memorial is read at the reader's own pace, with time to flip back and check a footnote. An oral round is live, and a judge's question can arrive on any part of the argument at any time, often testing the weakest link in the chain rather than the strongest. The most useful preparation step is building a one-page issue map for each side of the argument: the proposition, the two or three strongest authorities supporting it with citation and paragraph number, and, critically, the strongest counter-authority the other side is likely to raise, with your team's prepared response to it. This last part is where the good-law check pays off twice. If your own authority has been distinguished in later decisions on facts similar to the given fact pattern, you need to know that before a judge raises it, not during the exchange. If the opposing side's likely authority has itself been weakened by later treatment, that is a live line of cross-examination your team should be ready to use. Mooting judges, drawn from practising advocates, academics, and sometimes sitting or retired members of the bench depending on the competition, tend to test authority handling directly in oral rounds: asking a speaker to state the exact holding of a cited case, to confirm the paragraph the proposition comes from, or to explain why a case the speaker has not mentioned does not undermine the argument. A speaker who has done the good-law check and built the issue map answers these questions fluently. A speaker relying only on the memorial's footnotes, without having internalised what each case actually holds, does not. This is the same gap that separates a junior associate who has genuinely internalised research findings from one who has merely assembled a memo, a distinction covered in our [guide to training junior associates for legal research](/blog/legal-research-training-junior-associates). The habit of being able to explain a citation's holding without looking it up is worth building at the moot stage, because it is the same habit a bench, in either setting, is testing for. --- ## Where teams lose marks Judging feedback across moot competitions is not centrally published in a form that supports a reliable statistic, so this section describes patterns rather than numbers, drawn from the structural realities of how memorials are scored and how oral rounds are run. Advocates practising before Indian courts operate under a duty of candour that the [Bar Council of India Rules](https://www.barcouncilofindia.org/) require of every enrolled advocate, and mooting is where that habit of accurate, disclosed authority should first take root, not after enrolment. **Citation errors are the cheapest way to lose marks, because they are also the easiest to catch.** A wrong volume number, a paragraph pinpoint that does not say what the memorial claims, or a case cited for a proposition it does not support are all errors a bench can identify without any independent research of its own, just by pulling up the cited case. Unlike a genuinely difficult substantive question, where reasonable advocates can disagree, a citation error is not arguable. It is either correct or it is not, and a bench that finds one wrong citation reasonably wonders how many others in the same memorial were not checked. **Citing an overruled or superseded authority is worse than a formatting error, because it can undermine the substance of the argument, not just its presentation.** If the central authority for an issue has been overruled on the exact point relied on, the argument built on top of it does not survive, no matter how well the surrounding prose is written. This is precisely the failure the [good-law check](/blog/good-law-checking) exists to prevent, and it is precisely the check most likely to be skipped when a team is racing a memorial deadline. **Relying on AI-generated research without independently verifying every citation has become a documented and serious risk, not a hypothetical one.** The Supreme Court of India addressed this directly in [*Pooja Ramesh Singh v. Jammu and Kashmir Bank Ltd.*](https://api.sci.gov.in/supremecourt/2025/52338/52338_2025_5_1501_71939_Judgement_02-Jul-2026.pdf), 2026 INSC 668, Civil Appeal No. 11950 of 2025, decided 2 July 2026 by a bench of Justice P.S. Narasimha and Justice A.S. Aradhe, which dealt with reliance on AI-generated and hallucinated case law. The practical lesson for mooters is the same lesson that applies in professional practice: an AI tool, general-purpose or legal-specific, can produce a citation that reads as plausible, correctly formatted, and specific, and still refer to a case that does not exist or does not hold what it is claimed to hold. Every citation a team plans to put into a memorial needs to be independently confirmed against the primary source, whether the citation came from a database search, a textbook, a senior's old memorial, or an AI tool. Our post on [the Supreme Court's 2026 ruling on AI-generated case law](/blog/sc-ai-generated-case-law-2026) covers the decision in more detail, and the [guide to vetting a legal AI tool for citation accuracy](/blog/how-to-vet-legal-ai-citation-accuracy) sets out a test plan for judging whether a given tool's output is reliable enough to build a memorial argument on. More broadly, the [lawyer's duty to verify AI output](/blog/lawyer-duty-verify-ai-output) applies with equal force to a student building a memorial as it does to a practising advocate filing a brief. **Word or page limits that exclude careful editing.** Rulebooks commonly cap memorial length, and teams that draft to the maximum length without leaving time to cut weaker arguments end up diluting their strongest points with marginal ones. A shorter memorial built around four well-verified authorities per issue generally reads stronger than a longer one built around eight, half of which are weakly connected to the proposition they are cited for. **Mismatch between the memorial's citation format and the compendium's page references.** This is a purely mechanical error, but it costs marks on presentation and creates confusion in the oral round when a judge cannot locate the passage being discussed. --- ## The research-to-memorial workflow ```mermaid flowchart TD A[Read moot proposition] --> B[Frame researchable issues] B --> C[Identify governing statutes and provisions] C --> D[Search Indian Kanoon for case law] D --> E[Confirm text on eSCR portal] E --> F[Confirm statute text on India Code] F --> G[Shortlist authorities per issue] G --> H[Good law check on shortlist] H --> I{Still good law?} I -->|No| D I -->|Yes| J[Draft memorial with pinpoint citations] J --> K[Build compendium extracts] K --> L[Check citation format against rulebook] L --> M[Submit memorial and compendium] M --> N[Build oral round issue map] N --> O[Prepare responses to counter-authority] ``` --- ## A pre-submission authority checklist | Check | ✓ Done correctly | ✗ Common failure | |---|---|---| | Every case citation | Verified against the eSCR portal or official court portal text | Copied from a secondary source without checking the original | | Every case relied on | Confirmed still good law on the exact point cited | Assumed good law because it appeared in a search result | | Every pinpoint | Points to the paragraph that actually states the proposition | Points to the first page of the report, or to a headnote | | Citation format | Matches the competition rulebook's specified style | Follows a general citation guide instead of the rulebook | | Statutory references | Cite the current text, BNS or BNSS or BSA where the events post-date 1 July 2024 | Cite the IPC, CrPC, or Evidence Act section for post-July 2024 conduct without checking | | Compendium | Every extract matches the memorial's footnoted citation exactly | Compendium built separately and not cross-checked against the final memorial draft | | AI-assisted research | Every AI-suggested citation independently confirmed against the primary source | AI output taken as citation-ready without verification | --- ## Frequently asked questions ### What is the first step in moot court research? Read the moot proposition twice: once for the factual narrative, once to extract every statute, constitutional provision, and legal issue it raises. If the proposition frames the issues explicitly, your research questions are set. If it does not, issue-framing is itself the first research task, and it should be settled before deep case-law research begins, since every subsequent research thread depends on the issues being fixed first. ### Is Indian Kanoon good enough for moot court research? Indian Kanoon is a strong starting point for free full-text case discovery, including tribunal and lower-court material that curated databases often omit. It does not publish a citator or good-law flagging system, so a case found there needs a separate verification step, checking its citing decisions and the current statutory text, before it goes into a memorial as settled authority. ### How do I check if a case is still good law for a moot memorial? Confirm the case's exact text and paragraph on the eSCR portal or the relevant court's judgment portal, then search for it on a free citation source and read the most recent citing decisions to check for overruling, distinguishing, or adverse treatment. If your team has SCC Online or Manupatra access, check the platform's own overruled flag as well. Also confirm the statutory provision the case interprets has not been amended since the judgment. ### Do moot competitions require a specific citation format? Most moot rulebooks specify their own required citation style, footnote conventions, and word or page limits, and these vary between competitions and can change year to year within the same competition. Always follow the current rulebook's specified format as the primary rule. General Indian legal citation conventions, such as the [neutral citation and reporter citation formats](/blog/how-to-cite-indian-judgments), apply only where the rulebook is silent on a particular point. ### What is a compendium in mooting? A compendium is the bound set of primary source extracts, statutes and case law, that a team submits or brings to the oral round so the bench and opposing counsel can locate a cited passage directly without searching for it. Requirements for whether a compendium is needed, what it must contain, and how it should be formatted vary by competition, so the specific rulebook governs. ### Can I use SCC Online or Manupatra for free as a law student? Access depends entirely on whether your law school has purchased an institutional subscription and what seat limits or network restrictions that subscription carries, since licensing terms are set individually by each college. There is no universal free-student tier published by either platform. Where institutional access exists, it is commonly restricted to the campus network or a limited number of concurrent logins. ### What happens if I cite a case that has been overruled in a moot memorial? The consequence depends on how central the case is to your argument. If it supports a peripheral point, the damage is limited to that specific proposition. If it is a central authority for the issue, the argument built on it can collapse under a judge's cross-examination, and the error can also undermine the bench's confidence in the rest of the memorial's research, since the same failure to verify could apply to other citations too. ### How many cases should I cite per issue in a moot memorial? There is no fixed number specified across moot rulebooks generally, and memorial word or page limits vary by competition. A common pattern that works well within typical limits is citing the two to four strongest, best-verified authorities per issue rather than a longer list of weakly connected cases, since a shorter, more rigorously checked authority list tends to withstand cross-examination better than a longer, thinner one. ### Should I trust an AI tool's case citations for a moot memorial? Not without independent verification. The Supreme Court of India addressed reliance on AI-generated and hallucinated case law directly in *Pooja Ramesh Singh v. Jammu and Kashmir Bank Ltd.*, 2026 INSC 668, decided 2 July 2026. Any citation an AI tool produces, whether general-purpose or legal-specific, needs to be checked against the primary source, the eSCR portal or the official court text, before it goes into a memorial. ### What is the difference between eSCR and Indian Kanoon? The eSCR portal is the courts' own official judgment search and retrieval system, providing the authoritative full text of Supreme Court and High Court decisions. Indian Kanoon is an independent, free full-text search engine with broader coverage of tribunal and lower-court material, but it is not the courts' own portal and does not publish a citator. Use eSCR to confirm the authoritative text and paragraph numbering of a judgment you plan to pinpoint-cite, and Indian Kanoon for broader discovery. ### How do I handle the 2023 criminal law recodification in a moot problem? Determine whether the fact pattern's relevant events occurred before or after 1 July 2024, the date the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam replaced the Indian Penal Code, the Code of Criminal Procedure, and the Indian Evidence Act respectively. Cite the code that governed the conduct at the time it occurred, and note the corresponding new-code section for clarity where the point is likely to come up in questioning. ### What is the biggest research mistake mooters make under deadline pressure? Skipping the good-law check on the final authority shortlist. Teams commonly do thorough discovery research early, then finalise the memorial's actual citations close to the deadline without re-verifying that those specific cases are still good law on the specific point relied on. Building the good-law check into the research timeline, rather than treating it as a final polish step, prevents this. ### How should I organise research notes across a team of mooters? Organise by issue, not by team member or by source. Each issue should have its own running document with the framed proposition, the shortlisted authorities with pinpoint paragraphs, the good-law verification status of each, and the compendium extract location. This makes it straightforward to hand off drafting between team members and makes the final citation and compendium cross-check faster. ### Do judges actually check citations during oral rounds? Mooting judges, who are commonly practising advocates, academics, or judicial officers depending on the competition, frequently test authority handling directly by asking a speaker to state a cited case's exact holding, confirm the pinpoint paragraph, or explain why an unraised case does not undermine the argument. A speaker who has internalised the good-law check and built an issue map for the oral round answers these fluently. ### What should go into the oral round issue map alongside the citations? For each issue, include the proposition, the two or three strongest supporting authorities with citation and paragraph, the strongest likely counter-authority the opposing side may raise, and your team's prepared response to it. This turns memorial research into material a speaker can use live, under questioning, rather than material that only supports a pre-written script.