The mistake is starting with a search box.
You type the most interesting phrase from the proposition into Indian Kanoon, get four hundred results, open nineteen tabs, and by evening you have read a great deal and understood nothing.
Research is a sequence. Out of order, it wastes the week.
Statute before case law
Find the governing provision and read it in full from India Code. Not quoted inside a judgment. The provision itself, with its provisos, its explanations, and its amendment history.
This matters more in Indian law than students expect. A 2016 judgment interpreting a section substantially amended in 2019 may be worth nothing to you, and nothing on the page warns you. The only way to know is to have read the section first.
Then the rules, notifications and circulars under it. Then case law.
Three passes through the judgments
The landmark first: the decision that laid down the test everyone still applies. In Indian constitutional law that is often a Constitution Bench judgment from decades ago, and it is usually long. Read the ratio, not the headnote.
Then recent application. How has that test been applied in the last five years? A 1978 test applied in a 2024 judgment tells you what it means now, and gives you a citation the bench will recognise.
Then the authorities against you. This is the pass teams skip, and it is the one that decides rounds.
Read the other side properly
Do not simply note that a contrary judgment exists. Decide what you will do with it.
There are three options and you should know which you are taking. Distinguish it on facts. Argue it was per incuriam, or that the passage was obiter. Or concede the point and win elsewhere.
A team that has genuinely read the other side answers questions. A team that has not deflects them, and every judge on the panel has seen that difference a hundred times.
Know what you are holding
Ratio or obiter. Two judges or five. Affirmed, distinguished, or quietly buried. Whether the SLP was dismissed with reasons or in limine.
A judge asking "was that not a two-judge bench?" is asking a real question about whether the authority binds you. Not knowing costs more than never having found the case.
Take citations as you go
Full citation and pinpoint paragraph, at the moment you use the source, every time.
Rebuilding footnotes the night before submission is how teams lose marks they had already earned. Ten seconds during research; two hours afterwards.
When to stop
You stop when new searches keep returning cases you have already read.
Not when you have enough, and not when you are tired. When the well is dry, which usually happens earlier than people think and later than they wanted.
Where to search is a separate question. We keep a working list of free sources, college subscriptions and international material on the Research Starter page.
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