Errantry: Moot Problem

The 16th edition of the K.K. Luthra Memorial Moot Court Competition concluded this past Sunday. It is one of the few moot court competitions focused on criminal law as an area, and I was thrilled to have been able to author this edition's case for the Moot which can be seen here.

Broadly, the case concerned the law of theft, developing on both Indian law and judicial decisions as well as those from other Common Law jurisdictions (most notably, Canada). The substantive law of theft is a funny thing — all the pre-eminent decisions are not of recent vintage, and the only major case that did come through recently is one that I had profound disagreement with (Birla v. Adventz). Nevertheless, it still made for a compelling contest.

These issues on substantive law were meshed in a thicket of issues on the procedural side. Here, the idea was to bring in issues that might be commonly known amongst lawyers and law students — the idea of excluding illegally obtained evidence — and combining these with issues that are not so well-known but are of seminal importance — the issues surrounding the duty of disclosure placed upon the police / prosecutor, requiring that they share their papers with the defence.

Comments will be highly appreciated!