How to Verify a Pakistani Case Citation

The short answer

A citation is only a pointer. To verify it, find the judgment it points to, confirm it is the right case, read what it decides, and check nothing later has overruled it. The steps below take about ten minutes per citation.

How to read a citation

Reporter list as published by pakistanlawsite.com, checked 2 October 2026.

Five steps

1. Split it into year, reporter and page. A citation such as 2019 SCMR 984 means: year 2019, Supreme Court Monthly Review, page 984. PLD 1995 Supreme Court 34 means: All Pakistan Legal Decisions, 1995, Supreme Court section, page 34. The same case can appear as "1995 PLD Supreme Court 34" in some databases, so the order and the court wording vary. Reject a citation at this stage if the year has not happened yet or the reporter is not one that exists.
2. Find the judgment itself, not just the citation. A citation points to a report. The judgment it reports is a court document. The Supreme Court of Pakistan, the Lahore High Court, the Peshawar High Court, the Islamabad High Court and the Federal Shariat Court publish judgments on their own websites, generally those approved for reporting. If you can open the judgment on the court's own site, you have the most reliable source there is. Not every reported judgment is on a court site, so a miss here is not proof the case is invented.
3. Check it against a second source. Look the citation up in the law report itself or in a database: pakistancaselaw.com is free and searches by citation; Pakistan Law Site holds the PLD-family reporters on subscription. The case title, the court and the date should match what you were given. A real citation attached to the wrong case title is a common sign of an error or an invention.
4. Read what the judgment actually holds. Do not rely on a headnote or on someone else's summary of the point. Open the judgment and read the passage. Check the parties, the bench, the date and that the point you want to cite is the point the court decided, not an observation made in passing.
5. Check that it is still good law. A real judgment may have been overruled, distinguished or doubted by a later, larger bench. A count of how many later cases cite it shows how often it is relied on, not whether it was overruled. Look for later decisions on the same point before you cite it.

Warning signs of a wrong or invented citation

• The reporter and year look right but the page number does not lead to that case.
• The case title and the citation belong to different cases.
• No court website, database or law report shows the judgment.
• A tool gives a citation but cannot show you the judgment or a link to it.

How FAI handles citations

FAI Legal Research Assistant marks a citation as verified only when the judgment was retrieved from the court's own record during that answer. A citation it could not confirm is reported as unconfirmed rather than presented as fact. That does not make FAI a substitute for checking: its full-text mirror covers five courts (the Supreme Court of Pakistan, the Lahore, Peshawar and Islamabad High Courts and the Federal Shariat Court), its reported-judgment archive runs from 1947 onward, and the full text of the Sindh and Balochistan High Courts is not yet included.

What this page does not cover

• Citation style rules for pleadings, which depend on the court and the bench.
• Indian, English or Privy Council citations.
• Whether a particular judgment is binding on your court.

Frequently asked

Why can one case have more than one citation?

A judgment can be reported in more than one law report, so the same case may carry, for example, a PLD citation and an SCMR citation. Check which one the court or your bench expects.

Can ChatGPT or another chatbot give me a real Pakistani citation?

It can produce a citation that reads perfectly and does not exist, because it answers from model memory and Pakistani law is thinly represented in training data. Treat every citation from a chatbot as unchecked until you have opened the judgment.

Is a citation in a free database enough to file on?

No tool, including this one, replaces checking the official law report or the court's own record before you rely on a judgment in a filing.