J&K High Court closes contempt against Shardul Amarchand (2025): misquoting a judgment is not contempt without wilfulness

It is unusual for a top-tier law firm to find itself on the receiving end of a suo motu contempt notice over the contents of a legal notice it issued for a client. That is what happened to Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co. (SAM) before the High Court of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh. In early January 2025 a single judge, taking suo motu cognizance, initiated criminal-contempt proceedings against the firm, on the view that a pre-litigation legal notice had misquoted one of the Court's earlier judgments. Roughly two months later, on 20 March 2025, a Division Bench closed those proceedings — and in doing so set down a useful proposition about the boundary between a wrong reading of a judgment and a contempt of court.

The facts in brief

The dispute arose out of the Sawalkote Hydro-Electric Project. SAM acted for Sawalkote Prosjektutvikling AS (SPAS), part of the so-called Sawalkote Consortium — a grouping that, as reported, comprised SPAS together with Hindustan Construction Company and Ozaltin Construction. On 18 April 2022 the firm issued a legal notice, addressed to the Chairman and Managing Director of NHPC Ltd., advancing the consortium's position in the project matter.

The notice referred to an earlier judgment of the High Court dated 1 February 2010. According to the Court, the notice presented that 2010 judgment as having upheld the contractual relationship between the consortium and the Jammu & Kashmir State Power Development Corporation. The High Court's own view was that the 2010 judgment had done nothing of the kind: it had addressed arbitrary State action, and had neither examined nor upheld any such contract. On that reading, the legal notice had attributed to the 2010 judgment a holding the judgment did not contain.

The relevant writ proceedings — Sawalkote Prosjektutvikling AS v. Union Territory of Jammu & Kashmir & Ors., WP(C) No. 237/2024 — formed the backdrop. It was within that frame that the contempt question surfaced.

The initiation

The contempt was set in motion suo motu by a single judge, Justice Rahul Bharti, by an order reportedly made in early January 2025. The single judge took the view that several paragraphs of the legal notice contained, as reported by Verdictum, references to the earlier judgment that were "misconceived and perverted" and read out of context. On that footing, the Court issued a contempt notice to the firm.

The premise of the initiation is worth isolating. The objectionable conduct was not anything said or done in court, nor in any pleading filed before the Court. It was the content of a legal notice — a pre-litigation communication addressed to a counterparty, sent before the relevant proceedings were on foot. The question that arose, therefore, was a pointed one: when does a misstatement about what a judgment held, made in such a document, cross the line into criminal contempt?

What the Division Bench held

On 20 March 2025 a Division Bench of Justice Sanjeev Kumar and Justice Moksha Khajuria Kazmi closed the proceedings. The Bench did not treat every misdescription of a judgment as contemptuous. It located the gravamen of criminal contempt in this context in the mental element — in whether the misstatement was wilful and deliberate — and in whether it tended to obstruct the administration of justice.

As reported by LiveLaw in its account of the closure order, the Bench took the position that an interpretation of a court judgment, "even if differing from Court's intended meaning, generally does not constitute Contempt of Court as long as the interpretation is not wilfully or deliberately wrong." Applying that standard, the Court found SAM's notice to be bona fide. The firm had, on the Court's assessment, advanced an interpretation of the 2010 judgment without any intent to distort it; and it weighed in the firm's favour that there were no proceedings pending at the time the notice was issued. The proceedings were accordingly closed.

The shape of the ratio, then, is: a bona fide reading of a judgment — even one the Court considers wrong, and even one that differs from what the Court meant — is not criminal contempt, unless the reading is wilful or deliberately distorted and tends to obstruct the course of justice.

Analysis

The decision is, at bottom, an insistence on mens rea in this corner of contempt law. Criminal contempt is not a strict-liability response to inaccuracy. A lawyer's submission about what a judgment decided is, by its nature, an act of interpretation; and interpretation can be mistaken without being malicious. To treat every erroneous gloss on a judgment as contempt would chill exactly the kind of advocacy the profession is supposed to engage in — the marshalling of authority in support of a client's case, sometimes optimistically, sometimes wrongly. The Bench's requirement of wilfulness keeps the door of contempt closed to honest error while leaving it open to deliberate distortion.

The pre-litigation setting matters too. A legal notice is a partisan document: it states a client's position, often in its strongest form, to a counterparty. It is not a representation made to the court, where the duty of candour is at its most exacting. The absence of pending proceedings, which the Bench noted in the firm's favour, goes to the second limb of the test — the obstructive effect. Contempt protects the administration of justice; where there is no proceeding to obstruct and no court being misled, the conduct sits further from the heart of what contempt is for.

There is a structural contrast worth drawing with the classic categories of criminal contempt. The law has long distinguished conduct that scandalises the court — that lowers its authority — from conduct that interferes with particular proceedings. A misquotation of a judgment in a notice to a private party is awkwardly placed against either category: it does not abuse the judges, and it does not derail a live case. Read in that light, the closure is unsurprising. The single judge's initial reaction — that the notice's references were "misconceived and perverted" — captures a genuine irritation at seeing a judgment misdescribed; but irritation at a wrong reading is not, without more, the wilful affront that criminal contempt is designed to punish.

It bears noting how this case sits beside the landmark Indian authority on advocates and contempt. In E.M.S. Namboodiripad v. T.N. Nambiar, the Supreme Court upheld a contempt finding against a sitting Chief Minister for remarks that scandalised the judiciary as an institution — a paradigm of the deliberate, institution-directed attack. The SAM matter is the opposite pole: a professional act of interpretation, found bona fide, with no institutional affront and no live proceeding to disrupt. Read together, the two mark out the spectrum within which contempt against members of the profession is assessed.

Why it matters

For advocates and law firms, the practical significance is direct. The content of a legal notice — a document drafted day in and day out across litigation practice — does not become criminal contempt merely because it misstates what an earlier judgment held. What the Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh High Court has supplied, at the level of that Court, is a clear filter: the misstatement must be wilful or deliberate, and it must tend to obstruct the course of justice, before contempt is made out. A good-faith, even erroneous, reading of a judgment in a client communication falls outside that net.

That is reassurance, not a licence. The same reasoning that protects the bona fide error condemns the deliberate one: a lawyer who knowingly misrepresents a court's holding to gain advantage cannot shelter behind the language of "interpretation." And the fact that the firm here had to litigate a suo motu contempt notice — initiated, then closed — is itself a reminder that misdescribing authority invites scrutiny, even where it ultimately escapes punishment. The lesson for practice is the ordinary one of accuracy: a notice that states what a judgment decided should state it as it is, because the cost of getting it wrong, even innocently, is being made to answer for it.

Related on Valkya

• E.M.S. Namboodiripad v. T.N. Nambiar (scandalising the court)
• Delhi HC: Pahuja YouTuber criminal contempt
• Bar of Indian Lawyers v. D.K. Gandhi

Sources

• LiveLaw, "J&K High Court Closes Contempt Case Against Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas" — https://www.livelaw.in/high-court/jammu-kashmir/jammu-kashmir-high-court-closes-comtempt-case-against-shardul-amarchand-mangaldas-287045
• LiveLaw, "Jammu & Kashmir High Court Initiates Contempt Against Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas" — https://www.livelaw.in/high-court/jammu-kashmir/jammu-kashmir-high-court-contempt-against-shardul-amarchand-mangaldas-sam-280242
• Bar & Bench, "Jammu and Kashmir High Court closes contempt of court case against Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas" — https://www.barandbench.com/news/jammu-and-kashmir-high-court-closes-contempt-of-court-case-against-shardul-amarchand-mangaldas
• Verdictum, "Sawalkote Prosjektutvikling v. UT of J&K — Contempt Notice Against Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas" — https://www.verdictum.in/court-updates/high-courts/jammu-kashmir-ladakh-high-court-sawalkote-prosjektutvikling-v-ut-of-jammu-kashmir-contempt-notice-against-sharadul-amarchand-mangaldas-1563753