Close reading of the decisions that matter: the facts, the holding, the ratio, and what it changes for the practitioner — with the citation kept front and centre.
On 12 May 2026, a two-judge bench expunged findings of cruelty and desertion against a dentist wife who had relocated from Kargil to Ahmedabad for tertiary medical care and to pursue her practice, holding that 'marriage does not eclipse her individuality' and retaining the divorce decree on the ground of irretrievable breakdown under Article 142.
On 29 April 2026, a two-judge bench dismissed thirteen writs, two SLPs and eight contempts in the long-running hate-speech batch, holding that constitutional courts cannot create criminal offences, that no legislative vacuum exists in the IPC/BNS framework, and that police failure to register a suo motu FIR is not, by itself, contempt.
On 15 May 2026, a two-judge bench held that Section 6(5) of the Hindu Succession Act 1956 is a narrow saving clause that protects pre-20 December 2004 partitions from the retroactive coparcenary amendment of 2005, but does not bar a partition suit and does not displace daughters' independent Section 8 rights — which accrued on the intestate's death and pre-existed the 2005 amendment. An oral partition among sons alone cannot defeat the daughters' succession share, and a second Order VII Rule 11 CPC application on identical grounds is barred by res judicata.
On 29 April 2026, a Division Bench of the Bombay High Court comprising Justice A. S. Gadkari and Justice Ranjitsinha Bhonsale held that denial of a Police Clearance Certificate for a Public Service Vehicle badge — to a petitioner acquitted in the 26/11 case but separately convicted in the 2008 Rampur CRPF camp attack — is a reasonable restriction on the right to livelihood under Article 21.
On 24 February 2026, the Supreme Court restored a ₹600 crore Section 7 IBC petition, holding that informal restructuring with one debenture holder cannot defeat a debenture-trustee application that did not follow the Debenture Trust Deed's amendment procedure.
On 26 April 2026, a Karnataka High Court division bench held that show-cause notices under Sections 73/74 CGST Act are neither tax-period-specific nor financial-year-specific, allowing the Revenue's intra-court appeals and creating an inter-state split with Bombay and Madras.
On 22 April 2026, the CESTAT Principal Bench held that ECUs and sensors imported for assembly into Anti-lock Braking Systems are 'suitable for use' in motor vehicles and are denied the benefit of Notification 50/2017-Customs, but set aside interest and penalty on differential IGST for the pre-16 August 2024 period.
On 29 May 2026, a two-judge bench awarded ₹11 lakh in constitutional compensation for 24 days of illegal incarceration after a parole-release order, reiterating the 'obey first, appeal later' principle.
On 1 April 2026, a two-judge bench applied Mihir Shah to an NDPS arrest, holding that failure to supply written grounds of arrest before remand renders the arrest illegal even where section 37 ordinarily forecloses bail.
In January 2026, a Calcutta HC Division Bench upheld a divorce decree on the ground of cruelty under section 13(1)(ia) HMA, holding that a husband maligning his wife at her workplace, questioning her chastity and abusing her before colleagues strikes at the core of dignity protected under Article 21.
On 31 January 2026, a single judge of the Delhi High Court restrained Dabur from selling Cool King Thanda Tael in packaging deceptively similar to Emami's Navratna oil, reaffirming that trade-dress imitation is assessed on the totality of essential features.
On 15 April 2026, a two-judge bench inverted the conventional reading of the discharge–acquittal hierarchy, holding that a criminal-court discharge stands on a better footing than an acquittal and that disciplinary action on the same facts is barred once the armed forces have elected section 124 prosecution before a criminal court.
Delhi HC IP-Division Single Judge (Tejas Karia J.) upheld an interim injunction restraining Flipkart from using 'MARQ' and 'MARQ by Flipkart' for electronics, holding the mark phonetically, structurally and visually similar to prior-user Marc Enterprises' 'MARC' and that addition of the Flipkart house mark could not cure the deception.
Telangana HC DB (CJ Aparesh Kumar Singh and G.M. Mohiuddin J.) dismissed a PIL alleging ward-wise reservation between 70% and 90% in Telangana municipalities, finding the data did not substantiate the claim and reaffirming the horizontal-within-vertical reservation framework.
On 22 January 2026, a two-judge bench held that section 60(5)(c) IBC does not empower the NCLT to declare title in a disputed trademark when the approved resolution plan itself flags rival claims; trademark adjudication must be left to the competent civil court.
On 9 April 2026, the Supreme Court restated the Mobilox Innovations discipline: in a Section 9 IBC application the Adjudicating Authority enquires only into the existence of a plausible pre-existing dispute, not its merits; NCLAT cannot conduct a mini-trial to test the defence.
On 11 March 2026, a two-judge bench permitted withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment from a thirteen-year permanent-vegetative-state patient, classifying clinically assisted nutrition and hydration as medical treatment under the Common Cause framework.
On 13 April 2026, a two-judge bench held that the safety of commuters on national highways is an integral facet of the right to life with dignity under Article 21, and issued sweeping directions under Article 142 to NHAI, MoRTH, NHIDCL and State PWDs — including a ban on highway-shoulder parking and 75-day compliance reporting.
On 29 May 2026, a two-judge bench quashed POCSO and rape proceedings against an estranged husband's family on findings of tutored 'parrot-like' testimony, and articulated for the first time at Supreme Court level an explicit ethical duty on advocates not to assist vexatious matrimonial-dispute prosecutions.
On 21 February 2026, the Karnataka High Court set aside a CIC order directing disclosure of a husband's income tax returns to his wife under the RTI Act, holding that IT returns are 'personal information' exempt under section 8(1)(j) and issuing gender-neutral guidelines for financial-disclosure discovery in maintenance proceedings.
NCLAT Principal Bench dismisses appeals against CCI's bid-rigging finding on the polyacetal protective-tubes suppliers to Indian Railways; reads 'punished accordingly' in Section 48(1) of the Competition Act 2002 (pre-2023 Amendment) to mean the individual penalty must match the enterprise penalty in scale, applied to the active partner's income.
On 29 May 2026, Justice Sachin Datta of the Delhi High Court delivered a 144-page judgment recognising the Right to be Forgotten as an integral facet of informational privacy under Article 21 and laying down a workable framework for de-indexing judicial records.
NCLAT Principal Bench (Bhushan CP, Mitra and Baroka) holds that where a Technical Guidance Agreement itself creates a minimum-royalty obligation, the absence of invoices does not defeat a Section 9 application; ₹63 lakh deposit ordered failing which CIRP admission follows.
Justice Neerja K. Kalson held that a maternal grandmother in actual care and custody of her granddaughter has sufficient eligibility to maintain a section 125 CrPC application on the minor's behalf where the parental relationship has broken down; the minor's statutory right to maintenance cannot be defeated by a technical objection to who instituted the petition.
On 21 April 2026, the Supreme Court held that a rejection of a jurisdictional plea under section 16 of the Arbitration Act is not an interim award and cannot be challenged under section 34 until the final award is rendered.
On 22 April 2026, the Supreme Court held that the mandatory bail conditions under section 480(3) BNSS apply only to non-bailable offences punishable with imprisonment of seven years or more, correcting widespread trial-court template practice.
Valkya Editorial··9 min
Landmark JudgmentNational Green Tribunal (Principal Bench, New Delhi)
On 22 April 2026, the NGT Principal Bench held that the EIA Notification 2006 does not contemplate any 'deemed approval' of an Environmental Clearance, and directed the Tree Officer, MoEF&CC and the Delhi Pollution Control Committee to act within eight weeks against a 61-acre Dwarka project that had felled approximately 2,000 trees without clearance.
On 24 February 2026, the Supreme Court held that a stale and procedurally defective Scheme of Arrangement under Sections 391–394 of the Companies Act 1956 cannot defeat a Section 7 IBC application; Section 238 IBC override extends to defunct schemes; a 28-year corporate dispute reaches doctrinal resolution.
On 19 May 2026, a two-judge bench held that the first proviso to Section 223(1) BNSS — requiring the accused to be heard before cognizance is taken on a complaint — is a mandatory, substantive Article 21 right; cognizance without compliance is void ab initio, and the rule applies to PMLA complaints where cognizance is taken on or after 1 July 2024 even if the complaint was filed earlier.
In March 2026, a Delhi HC Division Bench dismissed an LPA arising from a denied EWS/DG admission, holding that Article 21A and the RTE Act 2009 do not confer a constitutional right to admission in a particular school of choice once the academic year has ended and an alternative seat has been allotted.
On March 2026, a two-judge bench struck down the State's 40–60% disability eligibility cap for an Assistant District Attorney post, ordered the appointment of a 90%-disabled advocate, and imposed ₹5 lakh costs on the State.
On 17 April 2026, a Bombay High Court division bench declined to follow Milroc Good Earth and referred to a Larger Bench the question whether a single show-cause notice under Sections 73/74 CGST Act may span multiple financial years.
On 24 April 2026, a two-judge bench permitted the medical termination of a 15-year-old's 28-week pregnancy, holding that Article 21's reproductive-autonomy guarantee — particularly for a pregnant minor — takes precedence over the MTP Act's statutory 24-week outer limit, and that adoption cannot be offered as a substitute for forced continuation.
On 6 April 2026, a three-judge bench held that the inherent powers under section 528 BNSS can be invoked to quash criminal proceedings where unimpeachable material displaces the prosecution's factual foundation; the Bhajan Lal framework carries through unbroken into the BNSS era.
On 26 May 2026, an Allahabad High Court division bench quashed an FIR, chargesheet and cognizance order against an advocate prosecuted for conspiracy after he filed a GST statutory appeal on behalf of his client using the Electronic Credit Ledger for pre-deposit.
On 27 May 2026, a two-judge bench held that once the Committee of Creditors approves a resolution plan, the Successful Resolution Applicant cannot renegotiate its terms — to permit otherwise would cause the architecture of the IBC to crumble.
SEBI Whole-Time Member Kamlesh C. Varshney finds the former Executive Chairperson of Religare Enterprises guilty of insider trading in REL shares sold 21-22 September 2023 in possession of UPSI of the Burman Group's 25 September 2023 open offer; orders ₹1.99 crore disgorgement with 12% interest, ₹40 lakh penalty, and a two-year market-access restraint.
On 28 April 2026, a Madras HC Division Bench struck down Tamil Nadu G.O. Ms. No. 18 of 13 March 2026 restricting maternity leave for a third pregnancy to 12 weeks, operationalising K. Umadevi (2025) and anchoring maternity benefit as a facet of Article 21 reproductive autonomy.
On 6 April 2026, a two-judge bench set aside convictions under section 294(b) IPC for use of an expletive in a heated exchange, holding that mere abusive or vulgar language without sexual or prurient content does not amount to obscenity.
On 19 May 2026, a two-judge bench held that a directed crime-scene re-enactment limited to physical movements does not per se amount to testimonial compulsion under Article 20(3); such material is admissible as corroborative — not substantive — evidence. Conviction restored on circumstantial proof; death sentence commuted to life.
On 28 May 2026, a two-judge bench held that the recall power under Section 311 CrPC cannot be used to plug defence lacunae or re-traumatise a rape prosecutrix four years after her cross-examination.
On 9 January 2026, a two-judge bench held that mandating medical age-determination at the bail stage in POCSO matters is impermissible and urged the Centre to consider a 'Romeo–Juliet' clause for close-in-age consensual relationships.
On 30 April 2026, a Bombay High Court Division Bench quashed a ₹1,524 crore IGST demand on Tata Sons' satisfaction of the NTT Docomo arbitral-award settlement, holding that enforcement consent terms are not a taxable supply under section 7 CGST and narrowing Entry 5(e) of Schedule II.
On 11 March 2026, a two-judge bench held that creamy-layer status under the DoPT 1993 Office Memorandum cannot be determined solely on parental income; the status-based and income-based gates must be applied as distinct, and the DoPT clarificatory letter of 14 October 2004 was held ultra vires the substantive 1993 OM framework.
On 5 January 2026, the Supreme Court struck down customs duty on SEZ-to-DTA electricity as ultra vires and reproached the Gujarat HC for departing from coordinate-bench precedent.
On 27 May 2026 a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court — Chief Justice Surya Kant with Justice Joymalya Bagchi — upheld the Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls across Bihar and West Bengal and refused to interdict the ongoing roll-revision exercise in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Rajasthan. The Court held the SIR validly grounded in Article 324 read with the Representation of the People Act 1950 and the 1960 Rules, drew a doctrinal boundary between the Commission's electoral-roll citizenship inquiry and a Citizenship Act determination, and directed the Commission to forward to the Union Ministry of Home Affairs within four weeks the names of voters deleted on doubtful-citizenship grounds. A close reading of the ruling, its anchor in Mohinder Singh Gill and its place in the 2026-27 electoral cycle.
On 14 August 2021, a Bombay High Court division bench stayed Rules 9(1) and 9(3) of the IT Rules 2021 pan-India — holding that the Code of Ethics for digital news media travels beyond the rule-making power conferred by the IT Act and chills Article 19(1)(a) speech.
On 6 November 1996, a three-judge bench held that once the appropriate Government issues a Section 10 notification under the Contract Labour Act prohibiting contract labour in a process, the displaced workers stand automatically absorbed into the principal employer's establishment. The doctrine lived for five years before a Constitution Bench overruled it in SAIL.
On 28 August 1981, a three-judge Bench led by Fazal Ali J. struck down the first-pregnancy termination clause and the Managing Director's uncontrolled retirement-extension discretion in the Air India and Indian Airlines service regulations, while upholding the differential retirement age and four-year marriage-bar for female cabin crew on cadre-classification reasoning. A digest of the mixed ruling, the sex-plus doctrine it installed, the feminist critique that followed, and the modern anti-stereotype frame in Anuj Garg, Babita Puniya and Joseph Shine that has substantially overtaken its weaker holdings.
Valkya Editorial··14 min
Landmark JudgmentNational Company Law Appellate Tribunal, Principal Bench, New Delhi
NCLAT held on 9 February 2026 that a contested endorsement-fee instalment, plausibly linked to actual service-days, gives rise at most to a damages claim, not to operational debt under s.5(21) IBC; CIRP cannot be a recovery forum.
On 8 November 2024 a seven-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court, by a 4:3 majority, overruled the 1968 ruling in S. Azeez Basha v. Union of India that an institution incorporated by statute could never be a minority institution under Article 30(1). The majority, authored by Chandrachud CJ on behalf of himself and Justices Sanjiv Khanna, Pardiwala and Manoj Misra, held that statutory incorporation does not extinguish minority status — what matters is whether the minority community established the institution in substance, traced through ideation, purpose and implementation; and that the conjunctive 'establish and administer' formula in Article 30(1) permits proportionate, not exclusive, minority administration. Three separate dissents — by Surya Kant J, Datta J and S.C. Sharma J — would have preserved Azeez Basha. The question of whether AMU as it exists today satisfies the new establishment test was remitted to a regular bench.
On 20 January 1999 — the first Supreme Court application of Vishaka — Chief Justice Anand, writing for a two-judge Bench, restored the disciplinary dismissal of a Private Secretary at the Apparel Export Promotion Council that the Delhi High Court had reduced. The judgment held that sexual harassment includes any unwelcome sexually-determined conduct and does not require physical contact; that unwelcomeness is judged from the victim's perspective; and that writ-court review of disciplinary action in sexual-harassment cases is narrowly confined to procedural fairness and proportionality. A digest of the holding, the CEDAW-anchored reasoning, and the line that runs from Vishaka through Chopra into Section 2(n) of the POSH Act 2013.
On 10 April 2008, a five-judge Constitution Bench upheld the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Act 2006 — providing 27% OBC reservation in centrally-funded higher education institutions including the IITs, IIMs, AIIMS and central universities — together with the 93rd Constitutional Amendment that inserted Article 15(5). The Bench extended the Indra Sawhney creamy-layer doctrine to OBC reservation in higher education, preserved the 50% reservation ceiling and required periodic review and quantifiable data. The validity of Article 15(5) for private unaided institutions was left for Pramati (2014) to settle.
On 12 May 2023, a two-judge Bench of Bopanna and Hima Kohli JJ. set aside the Goa University disciplinary inquiry against its former vice-chancellor for procedural defects in the Internal Complaints Committee and, more consequentially, issued nationwide directions to State Legal Services Authorities, the National Judicial Academy and statutory regulators for ICC capacity-building, compliance audits and training. A digest of the holding, the structural reasons the 2013 POSH Act needed a second judicial push ten years on, and the compliance architecture the directions installed.
On 16 December 1983, a three-judge bench held that Article 21 derives its life-breath from the Directive Principles and laid the foundation for continuing-mandamus supervision of bonded-labour rehabilitation.
On 21 February 1978, a seven-judge Constitution Bench laid down the triple test for 'industry' under s.2(j) of the Industrial Disputes Act, sweeping hospitals, clubs, and charities into its coverage.
A 2-judge bench in October 2021 reversed Delhi HC and held GSTR-3B cannot be rectified beyond the Section 39(9) window — electronic credit ledger finality affirmed.
The Supreme Court's April 2026 ruling on the conjunctive 'or' in *Rule 69(1)(c)* of the CCS (Pension) Rules 1972. A 2-judge bench held that the embargo on the release of gratuity operates for the entire duration during which either departmental or judicial proceedings remain pending against a retired employee — and the embargo persists until both sets of proceedings conclude. Exoneration in the departmental proceeding does not lift the bar where a criminal trial on the same allegations remains pending. The doctrinal line draws a sharp separation from *Jaswant Singh Gill v. Bharat Coking Coal* (2007) on the *Payment of Gratuity Act 1972* and is to be read alongside *Kadir Khan Ahmed Khan Pathan v. MSWC* (2026 INSC 16) as a 2026 SC pair on the post-retirement disciplinary architecture.
On 2 March 2006, a three-judge bench disciplined the aspect doctrine, restated the dominant nature test for composite transactions, and set the stage for the GST architecture of composite supply.
A 3-judge bench held in October 2019 that the doctrine of mutuality survives Article 366(29A) for incorporated members' clubs — sales tax and service tax both fail, GST left open.
On 20 August 2015, a two-judge bench held that composite works contracts could not be taxed as services before 1 June 2007 for want of a charging section and a machinery provision.
On 7 April 2026 the Competition Commission held seventeen electrical contractors liable under s.3(3)(d) for cover bidding and bid rotation in APHCL tenders, but issued only a cease-and-desist direction under s.27(a) — calibrating contravention-finding against penalty-quantum where the contraveners are small enterprises with geographically circumscribed conduct.
On 27 February 2009 a three-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court held that neither the RDDBFI Act 1993 nor the SARFAESI Act 2002 contained any express provision giving the secured creditor priority over the State's statutory first charge for sales-tax or excise dues. The non-obstante clauses in Section 34(1) RDDBFI and Section 35 SARFAESI did not, by implication, displace specific statutory first charges in State revenue legislation. The State's first charge prevailed. The decision drove the 2016 Amendment Act, which inserted Section 31B RDDBFI and Section 26E SARFAESI and reversed the priority position for registered secured creditors prospectively.
The constitutional status of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test for medical and dental admissions was decided three times over seven years. On 18 July 2013, a three-judge bench led by Chief Justice Altamas Kabir struck down the NEET notifications by a 2:1 majority — Justice A.R. Dave dissenting — holding that MCI and DCI lacked statutory power to prescribe a uniform entrance test for private unaided minority institutions. On 11 April 2016, a five-judge Constitution Bench recalled the 2013 judgment for inadequate deliberation. On 29 April 2020, a three-judge bench of Justices Arun Mishra, Vineet Saran and M.R. Shah overruled the 2013 ruling and upheld NEET as a mandatory common entrance examination across all medical and dental institutions in India, including private unaided minority institutions. A close reading of the 2013 majority and dissent, the 2016 recall, the 2020 operative holding, the distinction between entrance examination and admission decision that preserves minority autonomy within the NEET-qualified pool, and the downstream Neil Aurelio Nunes arc on OBC and EWS reservation in NEET-PG.
On 6 January 2026, a two-judge bench held that aluminium shelving for mushroom cultivation falls under CTI 76109010 as 'aluminium structures', not under CTI 84369900 as parts of agricultural machinery.
On 28 January 1999, a three-judge bench struck down Rule 57-F(4-A) of the Central Excise Rules and held that MODVAT credit, once properly taken on receipt of inputs, becomes an indefeasible vested right that subordinate rule-making cannot extinguish.
On 22 July 2022, a two-judge Supreme Court bench directed GSTN to reopen the common portal for two months, allowing every aggrieved taxpayer to file or revise TRAN-1 and TRAN-2 to carry forward pre-GST credit.
On 11 May 2020, the Supreme Court applied the Anuradha Bhasin framework to J&K's 4G blackout, constituting a Special Committee and holding that restrictions must be calibrated territorially and temporally to what is actually necessary.
On 17 November 1992, a five-judge Constitution Bench fixed the post-46th-Amendment ceiling on State works-contract VAT — value at the time of incorporation, with eight permissible deductions.
On 7 February 1966, a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court (Hidayatullah J. authoring, with Gajendragadkar CJ, Wanchoo, V. Ramaswami and Satyanarayanaraju JJ.) settled the foundational canon of Indian insurance-contract interpretation: the court's task is to interpret the words in which the parties have expressed their contract — not to make a new contract, however reasonable, that the parties have not made themselves. A cover note issued 'subject to the usual conditions of the Society's policies' incorporates the full policy framework, including a termination clause, even before the formal policy issues. The judgment is the strict-construction landmark; supporting principles of uberrimae fidei and contra proferentem read alongside but trace their foundational SC authority to Mithoolal Nayak v. LIC (1962) for the disclosure duty. Sixty years on, every Indian insurance-contract dispute begins from the Chandumull Jain canon.
On 21 April 2014 a three-judge bench of Justices A.K. Patnaik, Surinder Singh Nijjar and Fakkir Mohamed Ibrahim Kalifulla — with Patnaik J. pronouncing judgment — held that every iron-ore and manganese-ore mining lease in Goa had, in its renewed avatar, expired on 22 November 2007; that every mining operation thereafter was illegal; that the State's 'second renewal' orders had no statutory basis; and, drawing on the Justice M.B. Shah Commission Report, translated inter-generational equity into a financial mechanism by capping iron-ore excavation at 20 million MT a year, mandating e-auction of inventorised ores, and constituting the Goan Iron Ore Permanent Fund under Court supervision.
In February 2026, the Supreme Court held that the surviving partner in a mutual suicide pact is liable for abetment under section 306 read with section 107 IPC, closing a 23-year matter.
On 29 March 2019 a two-judge bench of Justices D.Y. Chandrachud and Hemant Gupta suspended — not outright quashed — the 28 October 2015 environmental clearance for the Mopa greenfield airport in Goa, and remitted the matter to the Expert Appraisal Committee for re-examination within a month, on a record that disclosed non-disclosure in Form-1 of ecologically sensitive markers, an inadequate cumulative-impact assessment, and faunal markers including the South Asian river dolphin that the EAC's recommendation had not engaged. A practitioner's read on the duty of candour, the EIA rigour standard, and the suspension-for-re-examination remedial template.
On 16 December 1983, a three-judge bench held that HAL's contracts with the Indian Air Force for the servicing and overhauling of aircraft were integral works contracts and not severable into sale-of-goods and labour components, applying the Gannon Dunkerley dominant-nature framework in its last cycle before the 46th Amendment recast the field.
A 2-judge bench of the Supreme Court — *S.B. Sinha, J.* and *P.K. Balasubramanyan, J.* — held in April 2006 that *Section 529-A* of the *Companies Act 1956* created a *pari-passu* charge between workmen's dues and secured creditors as a class, but did not abolish inter-se priorities among secured creditors. Where Parliament has not expressly displaced the rule, *Section 48* of the *Transfer of Property Act 1882* applies — the first-created charge prevails over the second. The decision is not, strictly, a SARFAESI judgment; it is a Companies Act and TPA judgment whose inter-creditor reasoning has since been read into consortium-lending architecture, second-charge enforcement and — in academic commentary — into the *Section 53* IBC waterfall.
On 13 February 1996 — six months before *Vellore* — a Division Bench of the Supreme Court led by Justice B.P. Jeevan Reddy applied the absolute-liability doctrine of *Oleum Gas Leak* to five chemical units at Bichhri village in Rajasthan and operationalised the polluter-pays principle as a remediation-cost obligation. The judgment is doctrinally the antecedent to *Vellore* on polluter-pays, the first explicit reception of customary international environmental law into Indian law, and — in its 2011 execution arc — confirmed recovery of ₹37.385 crore plus interest from the polluters.
On 13 December 2021, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court issued notice on a writ petition seeking recognition of gig workers as workers within the Indian labour-law architecture, social security entitlements under the Code on Social Security 2020 Chapter IX, and operational implementation of the Unorganised Workers' Social Security Act 2008 — a doctrinal classification question that remains pending.
On 7 November 1975, a five-judge Constitution Bench unanimously struck down Clause (4) of Article 329A — the Thirty-ninth Amendment's attempt to retroactively withdraw the Prime Minister's election from judicial scrutiny — as a violation of the basic structure. On the merits, the Court reversed the Allahabad High Court and upheld Mrs Gandhi's Rae Bareli election, but on statutory grounds: the retroactive amendments to the Representation of the People Act had taken the very corrupt-practice findings out from under Sinha J's judgment. The judgment installed free and fair elections, judicial review of election disputes and the rule of law as basic-structure components.
On 4 March 2020 a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court struck down the RBI Circular of 6 April 2018 that had directed banks and other RBI-regulated entities to refuse banking services to cryptocurrency exchanges. The judgment is the foundational Indian authority on proportionality review of regulator action affecting the Article 19(1)(g) right to trade — and is widely misreported as having legalised cryptocurrency, which it did not do.
A 2-judge bench of the Supreme Court — *Altamas Kabir, J.* and *Cyriac Joseph, J.* — held on 16 July 2009 that the Debts Recovery Tribunal's jurisdiction under *Section 17* of the *SARFAESI Act 2002* is not confined to the moment a *Section 13(4)* measure is taken; it extends to every action by the secured creditor in furtherance of *Section 13(4)*, including post-possession sale, sale confirmation and consequential steps. The DRT may scrutinise such actions on substantive grounds, set them aside, and — where illegality is established — restore the status quo ante. The decision is the foundational authority on the substantive (rather than merely supervisory) character of *Section 17* review.
On 9 January 2026, a two-judge bench held that shares received in an amalgamation in substitution of stock-in-trade are taxable as business income under Section 28; Section 47(vii) is confined to capital assets.
On 12 April 2021, a single judge of the Delhi High Court granted interim de-indexing of news reports of a prosecution that had ended in acquittal, applying the right to be forgotten under Article 21.
On 12 October 1999, a five-judge Constitution Bench upheld State sales tax on the full price of food and drink served at restaurants and bars under Article 366(29A)(f), with no service-element split.
A 2016 Delhi High Court division bench refused to read constitutional restraints into a click-wrap consent transaction but moulded transitional relief — and the case has been pending before a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court ever since.
On 9 April 2026 a Karnataka High Court division bench led by Chief Justice Vibhu Bakhru dismissed a PIL against the MHA's 'Vande Mataram' school-recitation advisory as premature, holding that the advisory's permissive 'may' formulation, absence of penal consequence, and lack of any actual coercive enforcement against the petitioner left no live constitutional grievance to adjudicate.
On 1 May 2001, a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court affirmed the Shambhu Nath Goyal threshold-pleading rule — management must, at the first opportunity in its written statement before the Tribunal, reserve the right to lead fresh evidence in the event the domestic enquiry is found invalid.
On 18 February 1992, a five-judge Constitution Bench upheld the Tenth Schedule's constitutional validity by a 3:2 majority but struck down Paragraph 7 — the absolute finality clause — for want of ratification under the proviso to Article 368(2). The majority held that the Speaker, when adjudicating disqualification under the Tenth Schedule, acts as a Tribunal whose decisions are subject to limited judicial review under Articles 136, 226 and 227 on grounds of jurisdictional error, mala fides, perversity, violation of constitutional mandates and breach of natural justice — ordinarily only after the final order. Sharma and Verma JJ dissented in part on severability.
On 5 February 2015 a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court — Dipak Misra and Prafulla Pant JJ., the principal opinion authored by Dipak Misra J. — held that a candidate's non-disclosure of pending criminal cases in the Form 26 nomination affidavit, where charges have been framed or cognizance has been taken, amounts to 'undue influence' within Section 123(2) of the Representation of the People Act 1951 and is therefore a corrupt practice rendering the election liable to be set aside under Section 100(1)(b). The judgment elevates ECI Form 26 disclosure to constitutional and statutory significance and extends the framework to local-body elections.
A Bombay High Court division bench split 1-1 in January 2024 on the constitutional validity of the IT Rules 2023 Fact Check Unit. The tie-breaking opinion of Justice A.S. Chandurkar in September 2024 struck down Rule 3(1)(b)(v) — vague, overbroad, and structurally inviting the state to be judge in its own cause.
On 6 July 2011, a three-judge Bench of Chief Justice S.H. Kapadia, Justice Aftab Alam and Justice K.S. Panicker Radhakrishnan — within the T.N. Godavarman writ — dismissed the Shella Action Committee's challenge and upheld the revised environmental clearance, site clearance and Stage-I forest clearance granted to Lafarge for its limestone mine at Nongtrai, East Khasi Hills, Meghalaya. Part II of the judgment used the occasion to issue forward-looking guidelines under section 3(3) of the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 — directing the appointment of a National Regulator, the expansion of Regional Offices, the constitution of Regional Empowered Committees, GIS-based decision-support databases, the sequencing of forest clearance before environmental clearance, and mandatory public hearing. A digest of the doctrinal architecture, the doctrine of proportionality, the anti-'fait accompli' principle, and the implementation record fifteen years on.
On 26 September 2013, a three-judge bench affirmed K. Raheja and held that pre-completion apartment sales by builders and developers fall within Article 366(29A)(b) as works contracts.
On 13 December 2000, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court — Justice D.P. Mohapatra authoring, with Chief Justice B.N. Kirpal on the panel — set out the foundational architecture for repudiation of a life-insurance policy under the second part of Section 45 of the Insurance Act 1938. The judgment held that after the two-year incontestability window, an insurer can repudiate only by establishing cumulatively that the impugned statement was on a material matter, that the suppression was fraudulent, and that the policyholder knew at the time of making the statement that it was false. The burden is a heavy one; mere inaccuracy is not enough.
On 22 July 1992, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court (A.M. Ahmadi J. authoring, with M.M. Punchhi J. concurring) held that the Life Insurance Corporation is 'State' within Article 12 of the Constitution and is bound by Part III fundamental rights; that the right of reply — the right of a citizen to use the same forum that has carried criticism of his work to publish a rejoinder — is integral to the freedom of speech and expression guaranteed by Article 19(1)(a); and that non-statutory administrative guidelines cannot ground a restriction on speech under Article 19(2). The companion appeal concerning Tapan Bose's documentary 'Beyond Genocide' on the Bhopal gas disaster applied the same framework to Doordarshan. The judgment is the doctrinal bridge between Sukhdev Singh's Article 12 jurisprudence and the broadcasting-access cases that culminated in Cricket Association of Bengal.
On 28 April 2026 the Supreme Court — Justices P.S. Narasimha and Alok Aradhe — dismissed the appeal of Lucknow Public School, Eldico, which had refused admission to a child from a disadvantaged group duly allotted by the State Government under Section 12(1)(c) of the RTE Act and the UP RTE Rules 2011 for the 2024-25 pre-primary year on the school's plea of 'uncertainty' about eligibility. The ruling holds that once a State authority allots a child under the RTE scheme, the neighbourhood school's duty to admit is mandatory and immediate; the school cannot interpose its own eligibility scrutiny or procedural conditions; and any refusal or delay is unlawful. The Bench characterised the 25% RTE reservation as a 'national mission' rooted in Article 21A, hardening the operational architecture that Society for Unaided Private Schools v. Union of India (2012) had set in motion.
On 27 October 2021, a three-judge bench refused the Union's national-security plea and constituted an expert committee to investigate the Pegasus spyware allegations against Indian citizens.
On 27 August 2014 a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court — Lodha CJ, Dipak Misra, Lokur, Kurian Joseph and Bobde JJ., the principal opinion authored by Dipak Misra J. — declined to read an implied disqualification into Article 75(1) prohibiting the Prime Minister from advising the appointment of persons facing serious criminal charges. Where the Constitution had prescribed no bar, the Court held, judicial mandamus could not constrict the Prime Minister's discretion. The Bench held, instead, that the Prime Minister was under a 'constitutional expectation' — emanating from constitutional morality, good governance and the trust reposed in high constitutional office — not to recommend the appointment of persons against whom charges had been framed for heinous or serious offences. The judgment is the analytical seedbed of the constitutional-morality strand in modern Indian constitutional adjudication.
On 8 April 2004 a three-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court upheld the constitutional validity of the Securitisation and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interest Act, 2002 while striking down its Section 17(2) requirement that a borrower deposit 75% of the demand before access to the Debts Recovery Tribunal. The Bench also read into Section 13(3) a duty on the secured creditor to communicate, in writing, the reasons for non-acceptance of the borrower's representation — a safeguard that Parliament codified within months as Section 13(3A) by the 2004 Amendment Act.
On 13 December 1996, taking suo motu cognisance of a press report on a Himachal motel that had encroached on protected forest land and diverted the Beas, a Division Bench of the Supreme Court formally received the Public Trust Doctrine into Indian law — quashing the prior approvals and lease, ordering restitution at the motel's cost and issuing show-cause on exemplary damages. A digest of the doctrine, why the Court read it into Articles 21 and 48A, and how it has since travelled from rivers and forests to spectrum and coal.
On 30 December 1996 — the penultimate working day before his retirement — Justice Kuldip Singh, sitting with Justice Faizan Uddin, delivered the Taj Trapezium judgment: 292 enumerated industries within a 10,400 square kilometre polygon around the Taj Mahal were directed to switch to natural gas or relocate outside the Zone, with labour-protective relief for workers in relocated units. A digest of how the Bench operationalised the *Vellore* principles, why it created a monument-centric zoning template, and how the continuing-mandamus device powered later orders from CNG-Delhi to subsequent TTZ rulings.
On 2 May 2016, a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court — in a judgment authored by Justice A.K. Sikri — upheld the Madhya Pradesh Niji Vyavsayik Shikshan Sanstha (Pravesh Ka Viniyaman Avam Shulk Ka Nirdharan) Adhiniyam 2007, which subjected private unaided professional educational institutions to State regulation over admissions, fee fixation, reservation and eligibility criteria. The Bench formally articulated and applied the four-prong proportionality test — legitimate aim, suitability, necessity and balancing — as the working standard for assessing reasonableness of restrictions under Article 19(6) on the Article 19(1)(g) right of educational institutions. A close reading of Sikri J's reasoning, the post-T.M.A. Pai and Inamdar regulatory architecture, education as a noble occupation, the proportionality test's doctrinal afterlife in Puttaswamy, Aadhaar and Anuradha Bhasin, and the regulatory framework that NEET would inherit in CMC Vellore (2020).
On 2 December 1977, a five-judge Constitution Bench held that Article 324 vests the Election Commission of India with plenary and residuary powers wherever statute or rules are silent, but that those powers must be exercised consistently with natural justice and on reasons stated when the order is made — not on reasons supplied later by affidavit. The judgment also reaffirmed that Article 329(b) bars judicial interference with the election process between notification and declaration, leaving the election petition as the sole post-result remedy.
On 18 October 2000, a three-judge Bench of Chief Justice Dr A.S. Anand, Justice S.P. Bharucha and Justice B.N. Kirpal — by a 2:1 majority — allowed the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam to continue, subject to the condition that the dam height be raised in 5-metre slabs only after the Relief and Rehabilitation Sub-Group of the Narmada Control Authority certified that R&R for displaced families had been carried out pari passu with construction. The majority articulated a doctrine of narrow judicial review in major-project PILs, held the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal Award binding, and treated sustainable development as a balancing exercise. Justice Bharucha dissented. A digest of the holding, the bench's reasoning, the dissent treated as the moral compass of environmental PILs, and the subsequent doctrinal arc.
On 31 October 2017, a five-judge Constitution Bench unanimously settled the methodology for computing 'just compensation' under the Motor Vehicles Act 1988. Authored by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, the judgment fixed the future-prospects framework on bright-line age and employment-status tiers, affirmed the Sarla Verma multiplier line, standardised the conventional heads with a built-in 10 per cent revision every three years, and brought a long period of MACT inconsistency to a close.
On 5 January 2004, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court (V.N. Khare CJI, S.B. Sinha J. authoring, and S.H. Kapadia J.) settled the 'pay and recover' doctrine for motor accident claims involving a driver without a valid licence. The bench held that third-party statutory liability under Section 149 of the Motor Vehicles Act 1988 persists even where the driver had no licence at the time of the accident; that the insurer must pay the third party first and may then recover from the insured under the breach-of-policy condition; that the burden lies on the insurer to prove deliberate breach as a precondition to recovery; and that the owner's contractual liability to the insurer is analytically separate from the insurer's statutory liability to the third party. The judgment installed the victim-protection architecture that runs through every subsequent motor accident decision.
On 19 August 1999, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court (Saghir Ahmad and R.P. Sethi JJ.) held that motor-insurance contracts must be strictly construed; that statutory permit conditions under the Motor Vehicles Act 1988 are read into the insurance contract where the policy expressly so provides; and that carriage of hazardous goods on a permit limited to 'unhazardous goods' takes the loss outside the scope of cover. The District Forum's dismissal of the insured's consumer complaint was restored; the State Commission and NCDRC awards that had overridden the policy terms on equitable grounds were set aside. The judgment is the motor-insurance extension of the Chandumull Jain construction canon and a disciplinary correction of consumer-forum overreach.
On 10 March 2026, the Supreme Court held that a valuation report is not statutorily required for a section 66 capital reduction and that a NCLAT bench may have a majority of technical members.
On 18 September 1982, a two-judge bench held that payment below minimum wage is 'forced labour' under Article 23, opening Article 32 to construction workers at the Delhi Asian Games sites.
On 22 June 1984, a three-judge bench of Justice P.N. Bhagwati, Justice A.N. Sen and Justice Ranganath Misra held that wholesale state-domicile reservation in MBBS admissions is unconstitutional under Article 14 — every Indian citizen has only one domicile, the territory of India under Article 5. Institutional preference for graduates of the same institution was preserved as qualitatively distinct from domicile reservation; PG specialty admissions were directed to be on all-India merit. Saurabh Chaudri (2003) raised the all-India PG quota to 50% and Dr Tanvi Behl (2025) reaffirmed the framework against Chandigarh's UT-resident quota.
On 6 May 2014, a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court — in a unanimous judgment authored by Justice A.K. Patnaik — upheld both the 86th Constitutional Amendment Act 2002 (inserting Article 21A) and the 93rd Constitutional Amendment Act 2005 (inserting Article 15(5)). The Bench held that the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009 and the special-provisions power under Article 15(5) do not apply to minority educational institutions, whether aided or unaided. Read with Society for Unaided Private Schools of Rajasthan v. Union of India (2012) — which had already carved out the minority unaided exemption — Pramati completes a two-step minority exemption from the post-Article 21A reservation architecture. A close reading of Patnaik J's reasoning on basic structure, the Article 30(1) minority autonomy core, the relationship with T.M.A. Pai and Inamdar, the legislative reversal of Inamdar's holding on private unaided reservation, and the live September 2025 reference questioning the Pramati exemption.
On 25 September 2018 a five-judge Constitution Bench led by Chief Justice Dipak Misra — Misra CJ, Nariman, Khanwilkar, Chandrachud and Indu Malhotra JJ. — declined to judicially bar persons against whom charges had been framed from contesting elections, holding that the disqualification regime under Articles 102 and 191 read with Section 8 of the Representation of the People Act 1951 is exhaustive and that only Parliament can add. The Bench instead issued five binding directions on Form 26 disclosure, party-website publication and three-times newspaper-and-electronic-media publicity post-nomination, and urged Parliament to legislate decriminalisation. The framework was extended in Rambabu Singh Thakur (2020) — 48-hour publication and selection-reasons requirement — and enforced through contempt in Brajesh Singh (2021).
On 13 March 2003, a three-judge Bench of the Supreme Court struck down Section 33B of the Representation of the People Act 1951 — inserted by the 2002 Amendment to neutralise the Court's direction in ADR (2002) — as unconstitutional and violative of Article 19(1)(a). The Court reaffirmed that the voter's right to know the criminal antecedents, assets, liabilities and educational qualifications of candidates is part of the freedom of speech and expression, and read down Section 33A as supplementing — not supplanting — the wider disclosure regime articulated by the Court and the Election Commission. Justice Dharmadhikari concurred in part and dissented in part.
On 16 December 2015 a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court rejected the Reserve Bank of India's standing defence that its inspection reports, willful-defaulter lists and supervisory communications with banks were protected from disclosure under Section 8(1)(e) of the Right to Information Act 2005 as fiduciary information. The judgment is the foundational Indian authority on regulator–regulated transparency and continues to shape RTI practice into the DPDP era.
On 24 April 2019, a two-judge bench of Justices Dr D.Y. Chandrachud and Hemant Gupta restored an insurer's repudiation of a life policy because the proposer had failed to disclose an existing Rs.11 lakh Max New York Life policy taken nine weeks earlier. The judgment, authored by Chandrachud J, holds that the existence of prior policies is a material fact bearing on aggregate risk concentration; because death and repudiation both fell within the two-year window, the pre-2015 second proviso to Section 45 of the Insurance Act 1938 had not yet attached, and the insurer needed only to establish materiality — not fraud.
On 20 March 2026, Justice Sachin Datta of the Delhi High Court quashed Look Out Circulars against NDTV founders Prannoy and Radhika Roy, holding that an LOC sustained for ~6 years without a chargesheet — and after the underlying agency itself closed one of the two FIRs — is an unjustified curtailment of the Article 21 right to travel.
On 13 December 2017, a three-judge bench ordered search engines to auto-block pre-natal sex-determination advertisements, recalibrating the Shreya Singhal intermediary safe-harbour for PCPNDT enforcement.
On 30 August 2001, a five-judge Constitution Bench unanimously held that no automatic absorption flows from a Section 10 notification under the Contract Labour Act. Air India Statutory Corporation was prospectively overruled. The remedy for displaced contract workers is industrial adjudication — not direct constitutional absorption.
On 3 February 2026, a two-judge bench upheld a joint Section 7 CIRP against two intrinsically linked Bhasin entities running the Grand Venezia project, formally endorsing group insolvency at the apex level.
On 10 July 2009, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court — Justice D.K. Jain authoring, with Justice R.M. Lodha on the panel — imported the English 'prudent insurer' test of materiality into Indian mediclaim jurisprudence and crystallised the insured's positive duty of disclosure at the proposal stage. The judgment held that a mediclaim policy is a contract of uberrimae fidei, that the insured is bound to disclose health conditions material to the risk regardless of whether the proposal form asks the specific question, and that consumer forums cannot override the uberrimae fidei architecture to reach equity outcomes.
The Supreme Court's first major pronouncement on the 2024 RBI Master Directions on Fraud Risk Management. A 2-judge bench held three things: there is no inherent right to a personal or oral hearing before fraud classification because the determination is grounded in objective documentary evidence and a written show-cause-and-reply procedure satisfies natural justice; banks must furnish the full Forensic Audit Report to the borrower as the rule, with only narrow exceptions for genuinely third-party sensitive material; and the doctrinal distinction between fraud — which carries criminality — and wilful default — which does not — justifies the differentiated procedural protections under the two regulatory regimes.
A 2-judge bench of the Supreme Court — *Dr D.Y. Chandrachud, C.J.* and *Hima Kohli, J.* — held in March 2023 that the principle of audi alteram partem must be read into Clauses 8.9.4 and 8.9.5 of the *Reserve Bank of India (Frauds Classification and Reporting by Commercial Banks and Select FIs) Directions 2016*. Classification of a borrower's account as 'fraud' by a Joint Lenders' Forum carries the consequences of civil death — credit-access debarment, reputational harm, director-disqualification fallout — and engages Articles 14, 19(1)(g) and 21. The borrower is entitled to notice, to supply of the forensic audit report (or its conclusions), to an opportunity to be heard and to a reasoned order before classification. No prior hearing is required before the lodging of an FIR under *Section 154* of the *Code of Criminal Procedure*, which is a separate criminal-law step.
On 17 February 2020, a two-judge Bench of Justices D.Y. Chandrachud and Ajay Rastogi held that the Ministry of Defence policy denying Short Service Commission women officers Permanent Commission in non-combat arms of the Indian Army — Army Service Corps, Ordnance Corps, EME, Signals, Intelligence Corps, AEC, JAG and the other streams in which women had been inducted as SSC officers — violates Articles 14, 15 and 16. The Court rejected the Centre's submissions about 'physiological limitations', 'domestic obligations' and unit cohesion as constitutionally impermissible gender stereotypes, set aside the 'staff appointments only' restriction in the 25 February 2019 policy letter, and directed that all serving SSC women officers be considered for Permanent Commission on terms equivalent to male officers with consequential entitlements. *Babita Puniya* installed the anti-stereotype framework that *Annie Nagaraja* (Navy) and *Lt Col Nitisha* (indirect discrimination) elaborated, and that *Lt Col Pooja Pal* (2026) operationalised through Article 142 structural compensatory relief.
On 19 April 2021, Justice Pratibha M. Singh of the Delhi High Court held that Section 21(4) of the Mental Healthcare Act 2017 imposes a positive, justiciable statutory obligation on every insurer to provide mental-illness cover on the same basis as physical illness, and that any policy clause excluding or sub-limiting mental-illness cover is void to the extent of inconsistency with the Act. The judgment directed National Insurance to reimburse the petitioner's Rs.5.54 lakh schizoaffective-disorder claim and required the IRDAI to circulate the order to every insurer. It was the doctrinal foundation for the IRDAI's 18 October 2022 circular and for the 2024 Master Circular on Health Insurance Business.
On 24 March 2015, a two-judge bench struck down Section 66A of the IT Act as unconstitutionally vague and overbroad, reshaping India's online-speech and intermediary-liability law.
A 2-judge bench of the Supreme Court reversed a Karnataka High Court order that had set aside a SARFAESI auction sale and upheld the sale in favour of the bank. Rule 9(1) of the Security Interest (Enforcement) Rules 2002 — the 30-day publication-to-sale window — is mandatory but, being 'definitely for the benefit of the borrower', is waivable by the borrower's conduct or written consent. A borrower's letter consenting to extension of time is a valid waiver. The decision separately reinforces United Bank of India v. Satyawati Tondon (2010) on writ self-restraint: where Section 17 SARFAESI supplies an efficacious DRT remedy, the High Court ought not to entertain an Article 226 writ.
On 12 April 2012, a 2:1 majority of the Supreme Court — Chief Justice S.H. Kapadia and Justice Swatanter Kumar — upheld the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009, including the Section 12(1)(c) mandate that all recognised schools reserve 25% of Class I seats for children from disadvantaged groups and weaker sections. The majority itself carved out the exemption for private unaided minority schools, on the reasoning that the mandate would impair the Article 30(1) right. Justice K.S. Radhakrishnan dissented. The two-step minority exemption began here; Pramati (2014) completed it for aided minority schools.
On 6 December 1991, a 4:1 Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court held that minority educational institutions — aided or unaided — retain the right under Article 30(1) to admit students of their own community on a preferential basis up to approximately 50% of seats, with the remainder filled by merit from the general pool. Justice Jagannatha Shetty's majority harmonised Article 29(2) with Article 30(1); Justice Kasliwal dissented. T.M.A. Pai (2002) later calibrated the rigid 50% cap institution-by-institution but left the autonomy floor intact.
In February 2026, the Supreme Court held that telecom spectrum is a sovereign resource held in public trust and cannot be subjected to IBC proceedings or the section 14 moratorium.
On 10 April 2006, a five-judge Constitution Bench led by Sabharwal CJ and authored by Balasubramanyan J held that public employment must follow Article 16 — competitive, advertised, merit-based recruitment to sanctioned posts — and that temporary, casual, daily-wage, ad hoc or contractual appointees made outside that scheme acquire no fundamental right to regularisation however long they may have served. The judgment drew a sharp doctrinal line between 'irregular' and 'illegal' appointments, granted a one-time, fixed-date paragraph-53 exception for irregular appointees who had completed ten years of service on sanctioned posts as of 10 April 2006, and overruled *Dharwad PWD*, *Daily Rated Casual Labour v. Union of India* and *Ashwani Kumar v. State of Bihar*. The decision remains the gravitational centre of Indian regularisation jurisprudence two decades on.
On 1 April 1958, a five-judge Constitution Bench struck down the Madras works-contract sales tax as ultra vires Entry 48 List II — the wall that eventually forced the 46th Constitutional Amendment.
The Supreme Court's April 2026 ruling that the right to dearness allowance, once incorporated into a state's statutory pay rules through a specific AICPI-linked mechanism, becomes a legally enforceable right that the executive cannot displace by memorandum — regardless of the state's financial constraints. Financial inability is not a defence to a statutory pay mechanism; executive economic policy cannot derogate from a statutory pay framework. The reasoning consolidates the doctrinal line that statutory pay mechanisms in public employment have the force of law, not the malleability of executive instruction.
On 11 May 2023 a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court unanimously delivered Subhash Desai v. Principal Secretary, Governor of Maharashtra — the apex court's most consequential Tenth Schedule ruling since Kihoto Hollohan. The Court held the Governor's 30 June 2022 floor-test call unjustified, declined to restore the Thackeray Government because of Uddhav Thackeray's voluntary resignation, struck down the Speaker's recognition of a rival whip on the principle that the whip is appointed by the political party and not the legislature party, and referred Nabam Rebia to a seven-judge bench. A close reading of the architecture, the doctrinal lines, and the unfinished business.
On 9 January 1991, a Division Bench of the Supreme Court — Justices K.N. Singh and N.D. Ojha — articulated the right to enjoyment of pollution-free water and air as part of the right to life under Article 21, and held that PIL standing in environmental matters does not require a personal-injury showing. On the facts the petition was dismissed as not bona fide and ₹5,000 costs imposed, but the legal principles — though technically obiter — have been treated as authoritative in every subsequent environmental Article 21 case.
On 23 November 2020, the Orissa High Court refused bail and articulated India's first judicial recognition of the right to be forgotten for survivors of sexual offences.
On 6 May 2014, a five-judge Constitution Bench led by Chief Justice R.M. Lodha struck down Section 6A of the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act 1946 — the statutory revival of the executive 'Single Directive' that this Court had abrogated in Vineet Narain (1998) — as violative of Article 14. The judgment closes the doctrinal arc: an administrative immunity, struck down in 1997-98, cannot be reintroduced in legislative form when the underlying constitutional defect remains. The decision became the analytical scaffold for CBI v. R.R. Kishore (2023) and frames the still-pending challenge to Section 17A of the Prevention of Corruption Act 1988 inserted by the 2018 amendment.
On 21 February 1975, a five-judge Constitution Bench held that statutory corporations created by Acts of Parliament — ONGC, LIC and IFCI in the consolidated appeals — are 'authorities' within Article 12, that regulations framed by such corporations under their enabling statutes have the force of law and bind both employer and employee as more than mere contract, and that public-sector dismissals made in breach of those statutory regulations are void, entitling the employee to reinstatement. Justice K.K. Mathew's concurring opinion laid the foundations of the 'instrumentality of State' doctrine that was elaborated in *R.D. Shetty* (1979) and *Ajay Hasia* (1981), and refined by the 7-judge Bench in *Pradeep Kumar Biswas* (2002). *Sukhdev Singh* remains the backbone of Indian public-employment jurisprudence.
Delhi HC in June 2016 held service tax on under-construction flats invalid in absence of statutory machinery to separate the service component from land and goods value.
A 2-judge bench of the Supreme Court — *J.S. Verma, J.* and *K. Jayachandra Reddy, J.* — held in March 1992 that a bank has a general lien on fixed deposit receipts in its possession under *Section 171* of the *Indian Contract Act 1872*, supplemented by the contractual right to set-off, and that an FDR deposited under a covering letter authorising retention 'so long as any amount is due' cannot be attached by a third-party decree-holder ahead of the bank's lien. The judgment distinguished the general lien from the particular lien under *Section 170* and is the foundational authority for the banker-customer set-off architecture in India.
On 12 December 1996, a two-judge Bench of Justice J.S. Verma and Justice B.N. Kirpal in W.P.(C) 202/1995 held that the word 'forest' in the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980 must be understood according to its dictionary meaning, irrespective of ownership or classification. The order constituted State Expert Committees, imposed felling moratoriums in the Northeast, J&K and other hill regions, protected workers in closed saw mills, and — through the formula 'this order is to continue, until further orders' — inaugurated what has become the longest-running environmental public interest litigation in Indian history. A digest of the foundational order, the 'deemed forest' doctrine, the subsequent architecture (CEC came in 2002, not 1996), and the doctrine's continuing engagement through 2026.
On 29 November 2006, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court held that the SARFAESI Act 2002 and the RDDBFI Act 1993 are complementary, not mutually exclusive: a secured creditor may simultaneously prosecute a Debts Recovery Tribunal Original Application under Section 19 of the 1993 Act and a Section 13 SARFAESI enforcement without first withdrawing the OA. The doctrine of election does not apply. The first proviso to Section 19(1) of the 1993 Act does not require withdrawal as a condition precedent — the Section 13(2) notice is a show-cause step, not 'action' within the meaning of the proviso. Section 13(4) 'possession' extends to physical possession.
The Supreme Court's foundational decision on the doctrinal limits of compassionate appointment in public employment. A 2-judge bench held that compassionate appointment is not a constitutional or fundamental right but a narrow exception to the *Article 16* rule, designed to provide immediate financial relief to the family of a deceased employee — not to bestow the deceased's post as an 'heirloom' on his progeny. The judgment installed the junior-most-post discipline, the financial-condition examination, the reasonable-time requirement, and a clear limit on judicial direction outside the rules. Thirty years on, the *Sawant J* framework remains the operative anchor of compassionate-appointment jurisprudence, read together with *Canara Bank v. M. Mahesh Kumar* (2015), *Canara Bank v. Ajithkumar G.K.* (2025), and the post-*Umadevi* (2006) regularisation discipline.
On 10 February 2026, a two-judge bench ordered ₹19.28 crore IGST refund credited to the Consumer Welfare Fund, holding Section 54 CGST Act an exhaustive code and rejecting an 'alien modality' tariff-adjustment route.
On 13 September 2021, a two-judge bench upheld CGST Rule 89(5) and held that refund of unutilised ITC under inverted-duty structure is limited to input goods, excluding input services.
On 26 July 2010 a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court held that the High Court should not ordinarily entertain a writ petition under Article 226 challenging measures taken under the SARFAESI Act 2002 where the borrower has an efficacious statutory remedy before the Debts Recovery Tribunal under Section 17. The alternative-remedy rule is self-imposed judicial restraint, applied with 'greater rigour' in tax, cess and bank-recovery matters. The Bench castigated the routine grant of interim relief in such writ petitions and held that the High Court was 'wholly unjustified' in entertaining the writ at the Section 13(4) stage.
On 28 August 1985, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court read Section 2(oo) of the Industrial Disputes Act with the breadth its language demands — every termination by the employer is retrenchment unless it falls within one of the enumerated exceptions.
On 6 March 1973, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court gave Section 11A its foundational construction — the Industrial Tribunal's own satisfaction on guilt and punishment displaces the four-grounds restraint of Indian Iron & Steel, and the Tribunal may alter the punishment imposed by an employer.
On 30 June 2023, a single bench of the Karnataka High Court dismissed Twitter's challenge to MeitY blocking orders covering 39 URLs and 1,474 accounts — and imposed exemplary costs of fifty lakh rupees. Section 69A, the court held, authorises account-level blocking; foreign intermediaries have only limited Article 19 standing; and selective compliance attracts deterrent costs.
On 28 April 1976, in the depths of the Emergency, a five-judge Constitution Bench held by 4:1 that a person detained under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act could not move habeas corpus because the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21 stood suspended by the Presidential Proclamation under Article 359. Justice H.R. Khanna's sole dissent — that life and liberty are not the Constitution's gift to be taken away by it — cost him the Chief Justiceship. Forty-one years later, in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, a nine-judge Bench explicitly overruled the majority and adopted the Khanna dissent as the constitutional position. A digest of the judgment, its setting, the dissent, the supersession, and the doctrine that has supplanted it.
On 15 February 2024, a five-judge Constitution Bench unanimously struck down the Electoral Bonds Scheme and the Finance Act, 2017 amendments to the RBI Act, Companies Act, Income Tax Act, and Representation of the People Act that had enabled it. The judgment held the architecture violated the voter's right to information under Article 19(1)(a), failed the proportionality test, and could not be sustained on the asserted ground of donor confidentiality. A digest of the bench, the doctrinal logic, the consequential directions to SBI to disclose bond purchase and redemption data, and what the judgment now requires.
On 5 May 2026 a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court, in Alpha Corp Development Pvt Ltd v. Greater Noida Industrial Development Authority, authorised the lifting of the corporate veil during the CIRP of a holding company so that the land assets held by its SPV subsidiaries — which had been used by the group to shield real-estate landbanks from homebuyer claims — could be drawn into the resolution estate. Decided on the factual matrix of the Earth Infrastructures group and producing relief for over 4,200 homebuyers, the ruling is the first clear apex pronouncement that the corporate-separateness principle can be lifted in real-estate insolvencies where the multi-SPV structure has been used to defeat the substantive resolution objective. A close reading of the bench's reasoning, the Article 142 architecture, and what the ruling means for SPV-structured developers, homebuyer associations, and the 2026 RERA-IBC recalibration.
On 2 March 2023, a five-judge Constitution Bench unanimously held that the Chief Election Commissioner and Election Commissioners must, until Parliament legislates, be appointed by the President on the recommendation of a committee comprising the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, and the Chief Justice of India. Parliament's response — the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office) Act, 2023 — replaced the CJI with a Union Cabinet Minister, and the constitutional challenges to the Act are now pending. A digest of the judgment, the committee architecture, and the contested response.
On 10 January 2020, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court led by Justice N.V. Ramana — hearing challenges to the communications shutdown imposed on Jammu and Kashmir after the August 2019 abrogation of Article 370 — held that the freedom of speech and the freedom to practise trade and profession over the internet are protected under Articles 19(1)(a) and 19(1)(g) of the Constitution; that restrictions on those freedoms must satisfy a four-step proportionality test imported from Puttaswamy; that suspension orders under the Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services Rules 2017 must be published and subjected to mandatory periodic review; and that Section 144 CrPC cannot be deployed to suppress legitimate dissent. The companion judgment in Ghulam Nabi Azad v. Union of India laid down the operative directions on Section 144.
On 24 August 2020 a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court — Justices D.Y. Chandrachud and K.M. Joseph — held that DLF's failure to hand over possession of flats in 'Westend Heights', Begur, Bengaluru, within the contractual 36-month period constituted 'deficiency in service' under the Consumer Protection Act 1986; that flat-buyers were not confined to the meagre Rs 5 per square foot per month delay-compensation cap in the one-sided Apartment Buyer's Agreement; that the consumer forum could award just and reasonable compensation; and that 6% per annum simple interest on the entire amount paid was awardable in addition to the contractual delay compensation. The judgment crystallised the one-sided clause doctrine months before its formal articulation in IREO Grace Realtech (January 2021).
On 28 March 2018, a three-judge Bench held in Asian Resurfacing of Road Agency v. CBI that interim stays of trial granted by a High Court in civil and criminal proceedings would automatically vacate after six months, unless extended by a speaking order. The rule operated for almost six years before, on 29 February 2024, a five-judge Constitution Bench in High Court Bar Association, Allahabad v. State of UP held it constitutionally unsustainable and overruled it. A digest of both judgments, the practitioner architecture they produced, and the constitutional position that now obtains.
On 7 October 2003, a two-judge bench of Justices Ruma Pal and B.N. Srikrishna reversed the Delhi High Court and upheld CBDT Circular No. 789 of 13 April 2000 — which had directed assessing officers to treat a Tax Residency Certificate issued by Mauritian authorities as sufficient evidence of residence and beneficial ownership for the purposes of the India–Mauritius Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement. The bench held that treaty shopping is not per se illegal in the absence of an express limitation-of-benefits clause, that the CBDT acted within its Section 119 power, and that Chinnappa Reddy J.'s anti-avoidance observations in McDowell (1985) were obiter and did not displace the Westminster principle in Indian law. A digest of the bench, the architecture of the DTAA, the doctrinal contribution, and the post-judgment arc through the 2016 Protocol, GAAR, and Tiger Global.
On 6 September 2012, a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court overruled Bhatia International and Venture Global and held that Part I of the Arbitration & Conciliation Act, 1996 applies only to arbitrations seated in India. The judgment prospectively rewrote the boundary between domestic-court supervision and party-chosen foreign seats, aligned Indian law with the UNCITRAL Model Law and the New York Convention, and laid the analytical scaffolding on which Indus Mobile, BGS SGS Soma JV and PASL Wind Solutions were later built.
On 18 May 2026 a Division Bench of the Delhi High Court, in Bansal v. Koninklijke Philips Electronics NV, set aside the 2018 single-judge SEP infringement decree by Justice Manmohan on Philips' DVD-related Indian Patent IN 184753 and articulated, for the first time at the Division Bench level in India, the evidentiary baseline a Standard-Essential Patent holder must meet at trial. The DB held that essentiality is a fact requiring proof through claim-charts mapped to the standard and through cross-examinable witnesses; that Philips' right was exhausted under Section 107A(b) of the Patents Act 1970 because the DVD components had been put on the market in China by Philips' authorised licensees; and that comparable-licence evidence is required to discharge the FRAND-rate burden. The ruling resets the FRAND-evidence architecture for the Ericsson, Nokia, Dolby and Malikie actions still on foot.
On 15 July 2014 a two-judge Division Bench of the Bombay High Court (Mohit S. Shah, C.J., presiding, with M.S. Sanklecha, J.) affirmed India's first — and to date only successful — compulsory-licence grant under *Section 84* of the *Patents Act 1970*. The decision sustained the Controller's 9 March 2012 order granting Natco Pharma a compulsory licence over Bayer's IN 215758 (Sorafenib Tosylate, sold as Nexavar) on all three independent grounds under *Section 84(1)* — reasonable requirements of the public unmet, price not reasonably affordable, and patent not worked in India. The Special Leave Petition was dismissed on 12 December 2014 with the questions of law left open. The judgment, read with the subsequent rejections of the BDR Pharma (Dasatinib) and Lee Pharma (Saxagliptin) applications, defines the practical contours of Indian compulsory licensing in the post-TRIPS public-health architecture.
On 23 July 2019 a two-judge bench of Arun Mishra and U.U. Lalit, JJ. delivered the 270-page Amrapali judgment in exercise of plenary writ jurisdiction under Article 32 of the Constitution. Acting on the findings of a court-ordered Forensic Audit Report, the Court cancelled the Amrapali Group's RERA registration, cancelled the Noida and Greater Noida lease deeds, appointed NBCC (India) Ltd at an 8% commission to complete the stalled projects, appointed Senior Advocate R. Venkataramani as Court Receiver, directed the Enforcement Directorate to investigate offences under FEMA and PMLA, and ordered ICAI disciplinary action against the statutory auditor. Dues recoverable from the authorities and banks were ringfenced to attached promoter assets and were held not to be a charge on the homebuyers or the projects.
On 15 April 2011, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court — Justice R.V. Raveendran writing — supplied the first authoritative analytical framework for arbitrability under the 1996 Act. The judgment installed the in rem / in personam taxonomy, enumerated six classic non-arbitrable categories, and held that a suit for enforcement of a mortgage by sale under Section 67 of the Transfer of Property Act 1882 is non-arbitrable. Booz Allen is the foundational anchor on which Vidya Drolia's four-fold test and Cox & Kings's group-of-companies doctrine were later built.
On 15 April 2026, a two-judge bench of Justices B.V. Nagarathna and Ujjal Bhuyan held that a bank receiving cheques for collection acts as an agent of the customer and is bound to present the instruments within the validity period; the failure to do so — resulting in the cheques becoming stale, without a reasonable explanation — constitutes deficiency in service under the Consumer Protection Act. The Court moderated the compensation, reducing the consumer-commission award from 10 per cent to 6 per cent of the cheque amount with 6 per cent interest. A digest of the holding and the doctrinal architecture for banking-agent liability.
On 9 January 2025, a two-judge bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan clarified the relationship between the Debt Recovery Tribunal's jurisdiction under Section 17 of the SARFAESI Act and the civil courts' residual jurisdiction over questions of title, partition, and the validity of pre-enforcement deeds. The judgment holds that the DRT's exclusive jurisdiction extends to the legality of Section 13(4) measures — and no further. Questions of ownership and the validity of deeds predating the bank's enforcement remain triable by civil courts under Section 9 of the CPC.
On 15 December 2016, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court — Madan B. Lokur, J. (authoring), R.K. Agrawal, J. and Dr D.Y. Chandrachud, J. — held that a two-tier arbitration clause, providing for first-tier arbitration in India and an appellate second-tier ICC arbitration in London, is valid and permissible under the Arbitration and Conciliation Act 1996. The bench resolved a decade-long impasse left by a 2006 two-judge split between Sinha J. and Tarun Chatterjee J., and reaffirmed party autonomy as the lodestar of the 1996 Act. A close reading of the bench, the contract, the doctrinal contribution on appellate arbitration, and the post-judgment arc through Centrotrade III (June 2020) which held the resulting foreign award enforceable under Part II.
On 2 November 2018, Pratibha M. Singh, J. of the Delhi High Court held that the luxury reseller darveys.com was not a passive intermediary under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act 2000 and could not claim the safe-harbour against trade-mark infringement. The judgment enumerated some twenty-six indicia of active involvement — paid membership, curated marketplace, control over which sellers could list, authenticity guarantees, logistics handling, non-disclosure of seller identities and use of the Louboutin name and Mr. Louboutin's image as meta-tags. A close reading of the active-versus-passive intermediary test under Section 79 read with Rule 3 of the Intermediary Guidelines Rules 2011, the post-judgment doctrinal arc through Amazon Seller v. Modicare and the Division Bench gloss on Amway v. 1MG.
On 15 September 2014, a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court — R.M. Lodha C.J., J.S. Khehar J., J. Chelameswar J., A.K. Sikri J. and R.F. Nariman J. — unanimously held that the proviso to Section 113 of the Income-tax Act, 1961, imposing a surcharge on tax computed in block assessments and inserted by the Finance Act 2002 with effect from 1 June 2002, operates prospectively only and does not apply to block periods ending before that date; the bench overruled the contrary view in CIT v. Suresh N. Gupta (2008) that had treated the proviso as clarificatory. The judgment is the modern leading authority on the presumption against retrospective operation of tax statutes — particularly statutes that levy a new tax, increase a rate, or impose a surcharge. A digest of the bench, the statutory architecture, the doctrinal contribution on the substantive–clarificatory distinction, and the post-judgment arc through Sankaracharya University (2023) and the GST retrospective-amendment challenges now mounting in High Courts.
On 15 November 2019 a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court delivered the most consequential IBC judgment of the post-*Swiss Ribbons* era. The Bench held that the Committee of Creditors' commercial wisdom on the distribution of resolution-plan proceeds — including unequal treatment of financial and operational creditors — is paramount; that the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal had erred in directing equal pro-rata distribution; that the *Section 53* waterfall is a guide but the CoC retains discretion subject to the *Section 30(2)(b)* minimum-liquidation-value floor; that the 'mandatorily' in the amended *Section 12* 330-day proviso is to be read down as directory in exceptional cases; and that the resolution applicant takes the corporate debtor on a 'clean slate' — claims not in the plan stand extinguished.
On 6 December 2023 a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court, in Cox & Kings Ltd v. SAP India Pvt Ltd, affirmed the group-of-companies doctrine as a valid and continuing part of Indian arbitration jurisprudence but re-anchored its legal foundation — moving it away from the textual hook of 'claiming through or under' in Sections 8 and 45, on which Chloro Controls had rested it, and into the consent-based definition of 'party' in Section 2(1)(h) read with Section 7. A close reading of CJI Chandrachud's judgment, the five-factor consent inquiry, the prima facie / final-call division of labour between referral court and tribunal, and what the doctrine looks like in post-Cox & Kings practice.
On 28 September 2001, a five-judge Constitution Bench upheld the constitutional validity of the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986 — but read its principal provision as requiring the husband to make reasonable and fair provision for the maintenance of the divorced wife beyond the iddat period, including for her future. The judgment is the foundational doctrinal contribution that preserved the maintenance architecture of Shah Bano through interpretation of the 1986 Act, and supplies the doctrinal frame within which the more recent Mohd Abdul Samad v. State of Telangana operates.
On 10 April 2026, Justice Tushar Rao Gedela of the Delhi High Court granted an ex parte ad interim injunction restraining a Bhopal-based publisher from using 'The Pioneer' trademark and from copying the contents of the plaintiff's newspaper. The judgment, in CS(COMM) 338/2026, treats the defendant's conduct — following the revocation of a 2004 Memorandum of Understanding — as a composite trademark-and-copyright infringement under the Trade Marks Act, 1999 and the Copyright Act, 1957. A digest of the facts, the relief, and what the order tells practitioners about the interim-injunction architecture in newspaper IP matters.
On 22 May 2026, Justice Mini Pushkarna of the Delhi High Court held that the use of a registered trademark as a bidding keyword to trigger sponsored advertisements constitutes infringement under Section 29(6)(d) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999 — and that Google could not, on the record before the Court, claim safe harbour under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, 2000. The judgment, which awarded damages of ₹30 lakh in favour of Hindware, sets the operative position on keyword-advertising trademark infringement in India. A digest of the holding, the doctrinal logic, and the implications for platforms and advertisers.
On 21 April 2026, a two-judge bench of Justices Navin Chawla and Ravinder Dudeja of the Delhi High Court convicted advocate Gulshan Pahuja — who runs the YouTube channel 'Fight 4 Judicial Reforms' — of criminal contempt under Section 2(c) of the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971, for content that the Court held was designed to scandalise the judiciary as a whole. On 16 May 2026, the same Bench sentenced Pahuja to six months' simple imprisonment and a fine of ₹2,000 in each of two criminal contempt cases. The judgment is a recent doctrinal application of the line between fair criticism and contempt of court in the digital-content environment.
On 4 May 2026 the Supreme Court — 2026 INSC 447 — held that the threshold question of 'membership' for the oppression-and-mismanagement jurisdiction under sections 397-398 of the Companies Act 1956 (and, by parity, sections 241-242 of the Companies Act 2013) must be read through the wider definitional framework of section 2(27) of the 1956 Act (equivalently section 2(55) of the 2013 Act), and not through the narrow technical formulation of section 41(2) of the 1956 Act. Investors who have contributed share consideration but face delays in formal register entry cannot be defeated by technical defences to the petition's maintainability — a holding particularly consequential for closely held companies where register-of-members entries are routinely contested.
On 9 December 2016, the Delhi High Court Division Bench — Pradeep Nandrajog, J. and Yogesh Khanna, J. — held that Section 52(1)(i) of the Copyright Act 1957, which permits reproduction of any work by a teacher or a pupil in the course of instruction, is to be read purposively and broadly and is not confined to physical classroom acts. Course-pack preparation by a university for its students falls within Section 52(1)(i) provided the inclusion is justified by the purpose of instruction. The DB articulated a fairness test rooted in the extent justified by purpose — qualitative and quantitative — and declined to transplant the US four-factor fair-use test. The suit was restored to the single judge for fact-trial; the publishers withdrew it on 9 March 2017.
The Supreme Court's review judgment of 10 December 2018, authored by Justice Ashok Bhushan for a two-judge bench (Bhushan + U.U. Lalit JJ), holds that the 2015 amendment to Section 8 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act 1996 — making reference to arbitration mandatory 'notwithstanding any judgment, decree or order' — does not displace the regime of special legislation that creates non-arbitrable in rem statutory remedies. An arbitration clause in a builder-allottee agreement does not oust the jurisdiction of the consumer forum; the consumer remedy is at the consumer's option. The NCDRC Larger Bench order of 13 July 2017 was approved. The reasoning has since travelled into the RERA-CPA interface through Imperia Structures (2020) and IREO Grace Realtech (2021), with HC divergence emerging in 2024-26.
On 11 May 2023, a five-judge Constitution Bench held that the Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi has legislative and executive power over 'services' — the administrative architecture of public servants serving the Delhi Government — with the exception of public order, police, and land, which remain reserved to the Union under Article 239AA. The judgment supplied a federalism architecture for the Union Territory of Delhi. A week later, Parliament responded with the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (Amendment) Ordinance, 2023, replaced by the Amendment Act, 2023, substantially reversing the judgment's operational effect. A digest of the judgment, the constitutional framework, and the legislative response.
On 27 November 2019, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court — Rohinton Fali Nariman, J. (authoring), Surya Kant, J. and V. Ramasubramanian, J. — struck down Section 87 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act 1996 (inserted by the 2019 Amendment) as manifestly arbitrary and violative of Article 14. The decision restored the no-automatic-stay regime built by the 2015 amendments and confirmed by BCCI v. Kochi Cricket (2018): a Section 34 challenge does not, of itself, stay the enforcement of an arbitral award; the award-debtor must apply separately for a stay under Section 36(3). A close reading of the architecture, the legislative-reversal pattern that brought Section 87 into being, the manifest-arbitrariness reasoning, and the practitioner discipline now stable on independent stay applications.
On 24 April 2026, the Supreme Court held that an unsuccessful party in arbitration can invoke Section 9 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act 1996 for interim relief at the post-award stage, pending Section 34 proceedings. The Court rejected the 'fruits of the award' doctrine that had restricted Section 9 to successful parties, reading Section 9's text — 'any party to an arbitration agreement' — to authorise the unsuccessful party to seek interim measures, subject to 'care, caution and circumspection'. The ruling resolves a long-standing High Court conflict and recalibrates the post-award practitioner architecture.
On 2 November 2020 a two-judge bench of U.U. Lalit and Vineet Saran, JJ. — the judgment authored by Lalit J. — held that Section 79 of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act 2016, which bars the civil-court jurisdiction over matters within the RERA Authority's remit, does not oust the jurisdiction of the consumer fora under the Consumer Protection Act 1986. The NCDRC and consumer fora are not 'civil courts' within the meaning of the Code of Civil Procedure; the Section 71(1) proviso, Section 88 and the 'without prejudice' framing of Section 18 of RERA preserve the consumer remedy alongside the RERA architecture. The choice of forum vests in the allottee, and the entitlement to maintain an action runs from the builder-buyer agreement date and not from the RERA registration date.
On 11 December 2023, a five-judge Constitution Bench unanimously upheld the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution and the constitutional re-ordering of Jammu and Kashmir effected by the Presidential Orders of August 2019 and the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019. Three judgments were delivered — by Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud (for himself, Justice Gavai and Justice Surya Kant), Justice Kaul, and Justice Khanna — converging on the result and disagreeing only on the route. A digest of the judgments, the constitutional questions they answered, and the doctrinal architecture they leave.
On 19 April 2017, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court held that the parties' designation of a seat of arbitration operates as an exclusive jurisdiction clause — vesting the courts at the seat with exclusive supervisory jurisdiction even where no cause of action arose there. The decision imported the international seat-as-jurisdiction principle into Indian domestic arbitration and supplied the analytic engine for the seat-versus-venue line in BGS SGS Soma JV, Mankastu Impex and Hardy Exploration.
The Supreme Court's first substantive ruling on the architecture of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code 2016. A 2-judge bench held that the IBC, enacted under Entry 9 of List III, prevails over inconsistent State moratoria through *Section 238* read with Article 254; the *Section 7* admission enquiry is narrow — confined to whether a financial debt and default exist — and once those facts are made out the National Company Law Tribunal must admit, with no residual 'I deem fit' discretion. The decision framed the post-2016 'paradigm shift' away from debtor-in-possession, was diluted by *Vidarbha* in 2022, and was substantially restored by *M. Suresh Kumar Reddy* in 2023.
On 29 March 2023 a Division Bench of the Delhi High Court, in Intex Technologies (India) Ltd v. Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson, delivered the country's first authoritative appellate framework on standard-essential patents and FRAND licensing. The judgment by Justices Manmohan and Saurabh Banerjee dismissed Intex's appeal, allowed Ericsson's cross-appeal, doubled the royalty security ordered by the Single Judge, held that injunctions and pro-tem royalty deposits are available to SEP holders against unwilling licensees, ruled that parallel CCI proceedings do not oust Patent Act jurisdiction, and established the 'willing licensee' inquiry as the central test in Indian SEP litigation. A close reading of the Bench's reasoning, the two-way street it builds between SEP holders and implementers, and the bespoke Indian remedy of pro-tem security that now travels through Nokia v. OPPO, Ericsson v. Lava and the wider Delhi SEP docket.
On 11 January 2007, a nine-judge Constitution Bench unanimously held that any law inserted into the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution after 24 April 1973 — the date of the Kesavananda Bharati judgment — is open to judicial scrutiny on the ground that it violates the basic structure or the Fundamental Rights forming part of the basic structure. The judgment closes the doctrinal loop that Kesavananda had opened: the Ninth Schedule cannot operate as a constitutional refuge from the basic structure doctrine.
On 11 January 2021 a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court — Justices Indu Malhotra and Indira Banerjee — held that one-sided clauses in an apartment buyer's agreement, heavily favouring the developer through asymmetric cancellation, token delay compensation and restricted refund rights, constitute 'unfair trade practice' within Section 2(1)(r) of the Consumer Protection Act, 1986. The allottee is not bound by such clauses; the developer cannot enforce one-sided forfeiture; the consumer forum has jurisdiction to refuse enforcement; and where the developer fails to deliver possession, the allottee is entitled to refund with interest. The judgment formalises the 'one-sided clause' doctrine first articulated in Wing Cdr Arifur Rahman Khan v. DLF Southern Homes (August 2020) and aligns with Emaar MGF v. Aftab Singh (2018) on the preservation of statutory remedies against private contractual ouster.
On 10 June 2020 Justice C. Saravanan of the Madras High Court Original Side, in ITC Limited v. Nestle India Ltd, dismissed ITC's passing-off action against Nestle's use of 'Magical Masala' on Maggi noodle packaging. The judgment holds that 'Magic Masala' and 'Magical Masala' are laudatory and descriptive — 'magic' and 'magical' are common laudatory epithets, 'masala' is a generic flavour descriptor — and that neither party used these terms as trade-mark identifiers. The dominant marks were 'Sunfeast Yippee!' and 'Maggi'; the disputed phrases functioned as flavour-variant descriptors. A close reading of the descriptive-use vs trade-mark-use distinction, the post-Marico v. Agro Tech architecture for laudatory marks, and what the judgment tells brand owners about packaging hierarchy.
On 7 November 2022, a five-judge Constitution Bench held by 3:2 that the Constitution (One Hundred and Third Amendment) Act, 2019 — which had inserted clauses authorising the State to provide reservation of up to 10 per cent for economically weaker sections, additional to the existing reservation under Articles 15(4), 15(5) and 16(4) — did not breach the basic structure of the Constitution. Justices Maheshwari, Trivedi and Pardiwala wrote separate concurring opinions for the majority; Justice Ravindra Bhat wrote a dissent on behalf of himself and Chief Justice U.U. Lalit. A digest of the bench, the holdings, the dissent, and the doctrinal arc of reservation jurisprudence after the EWS judgment.
On 26 September 2018, a five-judge Constitution Bench held that the creamy-layer principle applies to reservation in promotion for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes — and read down the requirement, articulated in M. Nagaraj (2006), that States collect quantifiable data to demonstrate backwardness of SC/STs as a condition for providing such reservation. The unanimous judgment of Justice Nariman recalibrates the doctrinal architecture between Indra Sawhney, M. Nagaraj, and the SC/ST promotion reservation regime. A digest of the question, the holding, the doctrinal logic, and the lineage.
On 26 September 2018, a five-judge Constitution Bench held by 4:1 that the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016 was constitutionally valid in substantial part, that its passage as a Money Bill was within Parliament's competence, and that Section 7 — the mandatory linking of Aadhaar with benefits — was sustainable. Section 57 — permitting private entities to seek Aadhaar authentication — and parts of Section 33(2) were struck down. Justice D.Y. Chandrachud dissented entirely. A digest of the judgment, the Money Bill question, and the doctrinal arc from the 9-judge privacy ruling through this 5-judge substantive engagement.
On 5 February 2019 a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court held that the Committee of Creditors' commercial wisdom in approving or rejecting a resolution plan by the requisite voting majority is non-justiciable. The National Company Law Tribunal's judicial review under *Section 31* is confined to *Section 30(2)* compliance — it cannot second-guess the CoC's commercial judgment. On rejection of all plans by the CoC, the Adjudicating Authority is obliged to initiate liquidation under *Section 33(1)*. The decision is the foundational articulation of the commercial-wisdom doctrine that organises post-2019 IBC jurisprudence.
On 4 February 2026 a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court — Justices Sanjay Kumar and K. Vinod Chandran — set aside the NCDRC's order of 23 August 2023 holding that a consumer complaint was maintainable despite prior RERA proceedings. The Court held that where two concurrent fora are available for the same cause of action, the homebuyer must elect one; having elected RERA, the homebuyer cannot retract to a parallel consumer-forum remedy on the same grievance. The decision narrows the concurrent-jurisdiction rule of Imperia Structures (2020) by overlaying election-of-remedies discipline — concurrent jurisdiction is preserved as a menu choice, not a buffet allowing migration mid-litigation. Concurrent jurisdiction at the outset is preserved; what is foreclosed is successive recourse to a second forum after election.
On 24 April 1973, a 13-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court — the largest ever assembled in Indian constitutional adjudication — held by a 7:6 majority that Parliament's amending power under Article 368 does not extend to altering the basic structure of the Constitution. The petition had begun as a religious-property challenge by the head of the Edneer Mutt; it ended as the most consequential constitutional ruling in the Republic's history. A digest of the bench, the line-up of opinions, the doctrinal contribution that has since governed every constitutional amendment, and the cases that have applied it.
On 30 May 2022 a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, in Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd v. A. Balakrishnan, held that the liability arising from a Recovery Certificate issued by a Debts Recovery Tribunal under Section 19 of the RDDBFI Act is a 'financial debt' within the meaning of Section 5(8) of the IBC, that the holder of such a Certificate is a 'financial creditor' under Section 5(7) entitled to file a Section 7 application, and — most consequentially for limitation practice — that the Certificate creates a fresh cause of action so that limitation under Article 137 of the Limitation Act runs from the date of its issuance, not from the date of the original default. A close reading of the bench's reasoning, its extension of the Dena Bank v. C. Shivakumar Reddy line, and what the ruling has come to mean for banks, ARCs and corporate debtors at the s.7 admission stage.
On 18 March 1997 a seven-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court, in a unanimous judgment authored by Chief Justice A.M. Ahmadi, struck down clause 2(d) of Article 323A and clause 3(d) of Article 323B to the extent they excluded the writ jurisdiction of the High Courts and of the Supreme Court over decisions of administrative tribunals. Judicial review under Articles 32, 226 and 227 was held to be part of the basic structure of the Constitution, tribunals were repositioned as courts of first instance rather than substitutes for High Courts, and the 'alternative institutional mechanism' theory of S.P. Sampath Kumar (1987) was partly overruled.
On 21 May 2021 a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court, in Lalit Kumar Jain v. Union of India, upheld the Central Government's MCA Notification of 15 November 2019 selectively bringing Part III of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code into force for personal guarantors of corporate debtors as valid conditional legislation, and held that approval of a resolution plan for a corporate debtor under Section 31 does not, of itself, discharge a personal guarantor — surety liability rests on the independent footing of Section 128 of the Contract Act. A close reading of the judgment authored by Justice Ravindra Bhat, the doctrinal architecture of the Section 60(2) common-forum design, and the doctrinal arc through Dilip B. Jiwrajka.
On 11 August 2023, a two-judge Bench of the Supreme Court restored an arbitrator's award of 18% compound interest after the Allahabad High Court had reduced it to 9% simple interest under Section 34 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act 1996. The ruling reaffirms that the Section 34 court has no power to modify; it may only set aside. Two years on, the 5-judge Constitution Bench in Gayatri Balasamy v. ISG Novasoft has qualified — not overruled — the proposition. A close reading of the holding, its lineage from Associate Builders through M. Hakeem, and the narrow modification corridor that Gayatri Balasamy has opened.
On 10 July 2013, a two-judge bench of Justices A.K. Patnaik and S.J. Mukhopadhaya struck down Section 8(4) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 — the provision that had given sitting MPs and MLAs three months from conviction to appeal before facing disqualification. The judgment held that Parliament had no constitutional competence to enact the exception: Articles 102(1)(e) and 191(1)(e) of the Constitution operate as immediate disqualifications on conviction. A digest of the holding, the constitutional reasoning, and the political-historical consequences.
On 24 March 2026 a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court — Surya Kant CJ, Ujjal Bhuyan and N. Kotiswar Singh JJ — held that the denial of Permanent Commission to women Short Service Commission Officers across the Army, Navy and Air Force was the consequence of a structurally discriminatory evaluation framework, not of individual merit assessments. Invoking Article 142, the Court created a legal fiction of deemed completion of 20 years' qualifying service for SSCWOs released during the long litigation, preserved already-granted Permanent Commissions, and directed that serving SSCWOs meeting the 60% Selection Board cut-off be granted Permanent Commission subject to medical and disciplinary clearance. A digest of the holding, the structural-discrimination reasoning, and the Article 142 remedial architecture that closes the Babita Puniya / Annie Nagaraja / Nitisha line.
Across two engagements separated by four years, the Supreme Court has held the Tribunals Reforms architecture introduced by the Union to be inconsistent with the constitutional protection of judicial independence. In July 2021, a three-judge bench struck down provisions of the Tribunals Reforms (Rationalisation and Conditions of Service) Ordinance, 2021 by 2:1. In November 2025, a two-judge bench led by Chief Justice B.R. Gavai held that the Tribunals Reform Act, 2021 was unconstitutional and inconsistent with the basic structure. A digest of both engagements, the doctrinal frame, and the tribunal-independence architecture they leave.
On 19 January 2021 a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court — Justices Rohinton Nariman, Navin Sinha and K.M. Joseph — upheld the constitutional validity of the IBC (Amendment) Act 2020 which inserted the second proviso to Section 7(1) requiring real-estate allottees to file jointly with a minimum of 100 allottees of the same project or 10 per cent of the total allottees (whichever is less). The bench held the threshold a reasonable Article 14 classification, treated the Article 19(1)(g) and Article 21 challenges as not made out (Article 21 expressly because alternative RERA and Consumer Protection Act remedies remained available), preserved the homebuyer-as-financial-creditor status validated in Pioneer Urban (2019), and exercised Article 142 to grant a 30-day window to pending applicants to align their pleadings with the new threshold. A close reading of Justice Nariman's judgment and what the threshold means for the present practitioner advising on a real-estate Section 7 application.
On 17 April 1985, a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court — majority opinion authored by Rangnath Misra J. on behalf of himself and three other judges, with a separate concurring opinion by O. Chinnappa Reddy J. — unanimously held that excise duty paid directly by McDowell's buyers to the State to obtain distillery passes formed part of McDowell's turnover under the Andhra Pradesh General Sales Tax Act, 1957; the structural arrangement was a colourable device. The majority articulated that tax planning within the law is legitimate but colourable devices cannot be part of tax planning; Chinnappa Reddy J.'s concurrence went further, drawing on the UK Ramsay–Burmah Oil–Dawson line to urge a substance-over-form approach. A digest of the bench composition (as independently verifiable), the architecture of the Andhra excise scheme, the doctrinal contribution, and the post-McDowell arc through Azadi Bachao, Vodafone, and the statutory GAAR.
On 31 July 1980, a five-judge Constitution Bench held by 4:1 that Sections 4 and 55 of the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976 — the provisions that had purported to give the Directive Principles overriding priority over the Fundamental Rights and to immunise Article 368 amendments from judicial review — were unconstitutional. The judgment is the operative authority on the harmony between Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles, on the limits of Parliament's amending power, and on judicial review as part of the basic structure. A digest of the bench, the doctrine, and the constitutional arc.
On 10 July 2024, a two-judge bench of Justices B.V. Nagarathna and Augustine George Masih held that a divorced Muslim woman is entitled to claim maintenance under Section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 (now Section 144 of the BNSS, 2023) against her husband, and that the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986 operates in addition to — not in derogation of — that secular maintenance right. The judgment is the most consequential restoration of the Shah Bano line in the post-1986 period.
On 19 May 2022, a three-judge bench of Justices D.Y. Chandrachud, Surya Kant and Vikram Nath struck down the levy of IGST on ocean freight in CIF imports under the Reverse Charge Mechanism — holding that an Indian importer who has already paid IGST on the composite supply of CIF-imported goods cannot be separately charged IGST on the ocean-freight component of the same supply. The judgment is doctrinally significant for a connected reason: the Bench held that recommendations of the GST Council have persuasive value and are not binding on the Union or State Legislatures. A digest of the holdings, the doctrinal architecture, and the refund consequences.
On 5 May 2017, a three-judge bench of Justices Dipak Misra, R. Banumathi and Ashok Bhushan dismissed the appeals filed by the four adult convicts in the December 2012 Delhi gang-rape and murder — known to public memory as the Nirbhaya case — and affirmed the death sentence imposed by the Trial Court and confirmed by the Delhi High Court. The judgment applied the rarest-of-rare doctrine articulated in Bachan Singh v. State of Punjab (1980) and held that the offence fell within its scope. A digest of the holding, the doctrinal application, and the architecture of capital sentencing it confirms.
On 23 December 2016 a Division Bench of the Delhi High Court, in MySpace Inc v. Super Cassettes Industries Ltd, set aside Justice Manmohan Singh's blanket 2011 injunction and worked out the first coherent Indian framework for intermediary safe-harbour in copyright. The DB held that the proviso to Section 81 of the IT Act does not preclude an intermediary from invoking the Section 79 safe-harbour in copyright suits; that 'actual knowledge' under Section 51(a)(ii) of the Copyright Act requires knowledge of specific infringing material at a specific URL; that takedown notices must identify works with specificity, location and ownership; and that no general proactive monitoring obligation can be imposed.
On 26 April 2013, a two-judge Bench of the Supreme Court upheld SEBI's market-access debarment and ₹50 lakh adjudicating-officer penalty against a whole-time director of Pyramid Saimira Theatre Ltd. for fraudulent misstatement of financial results under Section 12A of the SEBI Act and the PFUTP Regulations. Directors closely associated with management, the Court held, cannot 'shut their eyes to what must be obvious to everyone' — red flags in revenues, profits, receivables and deposits engage an affirmative duty of inquiry, and passivity is not a defence. The judgment is the foundational SC authority on whole-time-director liability for company-level securities fraud; the proposition has often been read more broadly than the case decides.
On 2 July 2009, a Division Bench of the Delhi High Court — A.P. Shah CJ and S. Muralidhar J — read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code to exclude consensual sexual acts between adults in private. The judgment articulated, for the first time in Indian constitutional law, sexual orientation as an analogous ground under Article 15, deployed Article 21 to protect sexual autonomy in the personal sphere, recast Article 14 around effect-based discrimination, and drew the distinction between constitutional morality and popular morality. The Supreme Court overruled it in Suresh Kumar Koushal in December 2013; nearly five years later, the five-judge bench in Navtej Singh Johar vindicated the reasoning. A close reading of the 2009 doctrinal moment and the procedural arc that followed.
On 11 November 2021 a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court — U.U. Lalit, Ajay Rastogi and Aniruddha Bose, JJ., the judgment authored by Rastogi J. — answered five framed questions on the constitutional and statutory architecture of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act 2016. The Bench held that the application of the Act to 'ongoing projects' — projects launched before but not completion-certificated by 1 May 2017 — is retroactive in operation and not retrospective, and is constitutionally permissible. The pre-deposit requirement under the proviso to Section 43(5) for promoter appeals was upheld; the Authority's single-member adjudicatory power to award refund-with-interest under Section 18 read with state Rules was upheld; and the refund-with-interest formula under the UP Rules — MCLR + 1% per annum — was read as part of the substantive architecture.
On 25 April 2023, a five-judge Constitution Bench in N.N. Global Mercantile v. Indo Unique Flame held by 3:2 that an unstamped arbitration agreement could not be acted upon under Section 11 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act 1996. Eight months later, on 13 December 2023, a seven-judge Constitution Bench in In Re Interplay overruled it unanimously — restoring separability, kompetenz-kompetenz and the prima facie referral standard, and confining stamping to a curable Section 35 admissibility question for the tribunal. A close reading of the architecture, the 3:2 split, the seven-judge overruling, what was decided, what was left for the tribunal, and how the arc from SMS Tea Estates (2011) to Tarini Mohanty (2026) now reads end-to-end.
On 19 May 2022, a three-judge bench presided by Justice Uday Umesh Lalit — through a judgment authored by Justice S. Ravindra Bhat — held that the secondment of expatriate employees by overseas group entities of *Northern Operating Systems Pvt. Ltd.* constituted a taxable supply of manpower under the Finance Act 1994, attracting reverse-charge service tax. Substance, not the form of the secondment contract, was held to govern; the employment matrix — payroll, social security, the right of repatriation — remaining with the overseas entity was decisive. The Court denied the Revenue the extended period of limitation under *Section 73*. The judgment has since travelled into the GST era through a wave of *Section 74* notices and a moderating CBIC instruction.
On 1 April 2013 a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court dismissed Novartis's decade-long campaign for an Indian patent on the beta-crystalline form of Imatinib Mesylate — sold abroad as Glivec (and as Gleevec in the United States). The Court read *Section 3(d)* of the *Patents Act 1970* as a heightened patentability filter for incremental pharmaceutical claims, glossed 'efficacy' as 'therapeutic efficacy', and held that improvements in bioavailability, hygroscopicity and flow are physico-chemical attributes that do not, without more, cross the s.3(d) threshold. The judgment supplied the doctrinal architecture for India's post-TRIPS anti-evergreening regime and remains the anchoring authority on incremental-pharma patentability.
On 10 July 1985, a five-judge Constitution Bench held in Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation that the right to life under Article 21 includes the right to livelihood — because no person can live without the means of living. The Bench was hearing a petition by pavement dwellers in Bombay challenging their eviction under the Bombay Municipal Corporation Act, 1888. The petitioners ultimately did not succeed in vacating the eviction architecture, but the doctrinal contribution — that livelihood is part of Article 21 — has shaped four decades of socio-economic-rights jurisprudence.
On 12 August 2005 a seven-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court, in P.A. Inamdar v. State of Maharashtra, refined T.M.A. Pai (2002) on the four-fold typology of educational institutions and held that the State cannot impose reservation or admission quotas on private unaided professional institutions — minority or non-minority. Chief Justice Lahoti's unanimous judgment endorsed common entrance testing, retained the Islamic Academy regulatory-committee model for fees in an interim role, disapproved Islamic Academy's directions on State-percentage quotas in unaided institutions, and held that Article 29(2) does not override Article 30(1) in minority unaided institutions — vindicating the partial dissent of Quadri J and Ruma Pal J in T.M.A. Pai. The 93rd Constitutional Amendment Act 2005, inserting Article 15(5), was Parliament's direct legislative response.
On 20 April 2021, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court resolved a long-running circuit split and held that two Indian-incorporated parties may validly choose a foreign seat of arbitration. The resulting award is a foreign award enforceable under Part II of the 1996 Act, not a domestic award; and the Indian parties retain access to Section 9 interim relief through the proviso to Section 2(2). The judgment treats party autonomy as the dominant principle of Indian arbitration, even where the analytic invites attention to public-policy and contract-law objections.
On 26 November 2019 a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court, in Perkins Eastman Architects DPC v. HSCC (India) Ltd, extended TRF v. Energo from the narrow case of an ineligible MD nominating himself a substitute to the broader principle that a person who is himself statutorily ineligible by reason of interest in the dispute cannot — even where he does not appoint himself — be the unilateral appointing authority. The Court appointed an independent sole arbitrator under Section 11(6). A close reading of Justice Uday Umesh Lalit's judgment, the doctrinal architecture, and the recalibration by the Constitution Bench in Central Organisation for Railway Electrification (8 November 2024).
On 1 February 2021 a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, in Phoenix ARC (P) Ltd v. Spade Financial Services Ltd, supplied the definitive Indian statement of the substantive content of financial debt — disbursement, consideration for the time value of money, and the commercial-effect-of-borrowing test — and held that collusive or sham transactions structured to mimic loans do not give rise to financial-creditor status. The judgment also extended the related-party exclusion in the first proviso to Section 21(2) to entities that were related to the corporate debtor at the time the debt was incurred but had since formally divested, rejecting a mechanical 'praesenti' reading. A close reading of Justice Chandrachud's judgment, the doctrinal architecture, and the post-Phoenix practice.
On 9 August 2019 a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, in Pioneer Urban Land and Infrastructure Ltd v. Union of India, upheld the 2018 Amendment to the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code that deemed homebuyer advances 'commercial effect of borrowing' and thereby financial debt under Section 5(8)(f), held that IBC and RERA operate in different fields and co-exist harmoniously with Section 238 IBC controlling on conflict, and drew the doctrinal line between genuine allottees with possession intent and speculative investors seeking only refund or profit. A close reading of Justice Nariman's judgment, the constitutional analysis on Articles 14, 19(1)(g) and 300A, the field-occupation reasoning and what practitioners advising developers and homebuyers should take from the case.
Read through the coordination lens rather than the constitutional-validity lens, Pioneer Urban v. Union of India is the case that built the structural relationship between RERA and the IBC. The three-judge bench held that the two statutes occupy different fields, that Section 88 RERA preserves remedies under other laws additively, that the Section 238 IBC non-obstante clause is engaged only on an actual operational conflict, and that the same homebuyer can simultaneously stand as RERA allottee, CPA consumer and IBC financial creditor. The genuine-allottee/speculative-investor distinction is the IBC's internal abuse-prevention valve, examined at the Section 7 admission stage and reinforced by the Section 65 discipline. This editorial draws the textual map, the field-occupation analysis and the downstream architecture leading to Manish Kumar (2021) and the project-wise CIRP codified by the IBC (Amendment) Act 2026.
On 5 November 2024, a nine-judge Constitution Bench held by 7:2 that not every private property qualifies as a 'material resource of the community' under Article 39(b) of the Constitution — and overruled Sanjeev Coke Manufacturing Co. v. Bharat Coking Coal (1983), which had adopted Justice Krishna Iyer's expansive minority position in Ranganatha Reddy as the rule. The judgment recalibrates the relationship between private property and the State's redistributive power, and sets out a multi-factor inquiry for what falls within Article 39(b)'s reach.
On 30 July 1992 a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court in Mohini Jain v. State of Karnataka read the right to education out of Article 21 read with the Directive Principles in Articles 38, 39, 41 and 45 and struck down capitation fees in professional colleges. Seven months later, on 4 February 1993, a five-judge Constitution Bench in Unni Krishnan v. State of A.P. refined and re-stated the right — bifurcating its content so that free and compulsory education up to the age of fourteen became enforceable as a fundamental right (later codified as Article 21A by the 86th Amendment) while education beyond that age remained subject to the State's economic capacity. The Bench also imposed the free-seats / payment-seats scheme on private unaided professional institutions and capped capitation fees as unconstitutional. The combined two-step articulation set the doctrinal frame from which the 86th Amendment (2002), the RTE Act 2009, Society for Unaided Private Schools (2012) and Pramati (2014) all proceeded.
On 27 November 2015 a two-judge Division Bench of the Delhi High Court (Pradeep Nandrajog, J. and Mukta Gupta, J.) delivered the long-awaited decision on Roche's IN 196774 — the Indian patent on Erlotinib Hydrochloride, sold as Tarceva — and Cipla's accused generic Erlocip. The Bench held the suit patent valid, held Cipla's Polymorph B product within the scope of the compound patent (the failure of Roche's downstream Polymorph B claim under *Section 3(d)* did not narrow the parent compound patent), declined a permanent injunction because the patent was within months of expiry, and — most consequentially — held that *Section 3(d)* of the *Patents Act 1970* is a patent-eligibility provision operating at the grant stage and is not available as a defence at the infringement stage. The decision imposed ₹5 lakh in costs on Cipla and remanded for an accounts inquiry. The Special Leave Petition was admitted in 2016 and withdrawn under settlement in June 2017; the Delhi Bench's framework remains good law.
On 10 February 1970, an eleven-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court struck down the Banking Companies (Acquisition and Transfer of Undertakings) Act, 1969 by a ten-to-one majority. Justice J.C. Shah's majority judgment did three doctrinally distinct things: it read Article 31(2) compensation as a 'just equivalent', it replaced the object/subject test with an effect test, and it overruled A.K. Gopalan's silo theory of fundamental rights — the analytical move that, eight years later, made the golden triangle of Maneka Gandhi possible.
On 3 October 2024, a two-judge bench of Justices Abhay S. Oka and Sanjay Karol held that the textual choice of 'plant or machinery' — rather than 'plant and machinery' — in *Section 17(5)(d) of the CGST Act, 2017* was deliberate, and that a building could qualify as 'plant' for input-tax-credit purposes if the functionality test was satisfied. The Finance Act 2025 substituted 'and' for 'or' with retrospective effect from 1 July 2017, nullifying the reading; the review petition was dismissed on 20 May 2025; constitutional challenges to the retrospective amendment are now mounting in the High Courts. A digest of the holding, the legislative reversal, and the live constitutional terrain.
On 31 August 2012, a two-judge Bench of the Supreme Court delivered the most consequential ruling on the SEBI–MCA jurisdictional boundary the regulatory architecture had seen. Two Sahara group companies had raised approximately ₹24,029.73 crore from around three crore investors through optionally fully convertible debentures, calling the issue a private placement. The Court held the issues were deemed public offers under the first proviso to Section 67(3) of the Companies Act, 1956, brought them squarely within SEBI's jurisdiction, and directed refund of approximately ₹17,400 crore with 15 per cent interest into a SEBI-administered account. The judgment reset the listing-trigger architecture, foreshadowed the Companies Act, 2013 private-placement framework, and produced one of the longest-running enforcement sagas in Indian regulatory history.
On 6 May 2004, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India — Ruma Pal, J. and P. Venkatarama Reddi, J. — held that a domain name is more than a mere internet address; it functions as a business identifier capable of trade-mark protection under the Trade Marks Act 1999 and the common-law tort of passing off. The Court reversed the Karnataka High Court Division Bench and restored the City Civil Judge Bangalore's interim injunction against Siffynet Solutions in favour of Satyam Infoway. A close reading of the territoriality of cyberspace question, the classical trinity test applied to coined word marks, the dicta on the UDRP and ICANN architecture and the foundational role of the judgment in the .in INDRP framework.
On 16 October 2015, a five-judge Constitution Bench held by 4:1 that the Constitution (Ninety-ninth Amendment) Act, 2014 and the National Judicial Appointments Commission Act, 2014 were unconstitutional — and restored the collegium system for the appointment of judges to the Supreme Court and the High Courts. The majority held that judicial primacy in the appointment process is part of the independence of the judiciary, which is part of the basic structure of the Constitution. Justice Chelameswar dissented entirely. A digest of the bench, the doctrinal architecture, and the Memorandum of Procedure question that remains.
On 18 May 2026, a two-judge bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and Augustine George Masih clarified that Section 6(5) of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 — which protects pre-2004 partitions from the retroactive coparcenary amendment of 2005 — does not create a jurisdictional bar to a partition suit and does not extinguish the independent statutory succession rights of Class I heirs under Section 8. The judgment reinforces the doctrinal architecture that Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma (2020) had established and clarifies the relationship between the coparcenary line and the intestate succession line under the Hindu Succession Act.
On 17 March 2026, a two-judge bench of Justices Pankaj Mithal and Prasanna B. Varale held that amounts received by the dependants of the deceased under employer-provided group insurance — or under other contractual or social-security benefits — cannot be treated as 'pecuniary advantages' liable to be deducted from compensation awarded under the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988. The judgment affirms the prior doctrinal line that advantages accruing from contracts performed during the deceased's lifetime are not outcomes of the death itself, and produces a working frame for the just-compensation architecture in motor-accident claims.
On 26 May 2026, a Supreme Court bench of Justices K.V. Viswanathan and Vijay Bishnoi modified a life sentence to the period already undergone by the appellant — a man who had spent over twenty-three years in custody without remission. The judgment reaffirms the settled position that the imposition of a life sentence does not bar modification to a fixed-term sentence where the convict has already undergone more than 14 years of imprisonment, and reads against the architecture of remission and pre-mature release under the criminal-justice system.
On 28 August 2024, the Supreme Court granted bail to Prem Prakash — an associate of the then-Chief Minister of Jharkhand — in a Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 matter, after he had spent over a year in custody. The judgment reaffirmed the constitutional principle that 'bail is the rule, jail is the exception' in PMLA cases, held statements made by an accused while in PMLA custody to be inadmissible against him under Section 50 PMLA, and continued the post-Vijay Madanlal arc in which the Court has moderated the operation of the twin bail conditions where prolonged incarceration meets the proportionality test of liberty. A digest of the holding, the doctrinal frame, and where the PMLA bail line stands now.
On 27 January 2026, a two-judge bench of Justices Pankaj Mithal and S.V.N. Bhatti held that disputes relating to the employment, termination, or alleged sham nature of contract labour arrangements must be adjudicated by a Labour Court or Industrial Tribunal under the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947 — and that the State's reference jurisdiction operates even on an apprehended dispute and is not foreclosed by the absence of a prior written demand on the employer. The judgment reaffirms the SAIL safeguards for contract labour and supplies a working architecture for contract-labour litigation.
On 17 March 2026 a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court (J.B. Pardiwala and K.V. Viswanathan JJ., judgment authored by Viswanathan J.) held that the use-of-proceeds objects disclosed by an issuer for a preferential issue are market-facing regulatory commitments under the SEBI (ICDR) Regulations 2009, and that post-allotment diversion of those proceeds constitutes fraud under the PFUTP Regulations 2003 — not curable by a subsequent shareholder ratification resolution or by an alteration of the Memorandum of Association. The Court separately confirmed that proceedings under sections 11 and 11B of the SEBI Act 1992 by the Whole-Time Member and adjudication under section 15HA by the Adjudicating Officer occupy distinct preventive and punitive spheres, and may be pursued in parallel.
On 22 August 2017, a Constitution Bench of five judges drawn from five faiths held by 3:2 that talaq-e-biddat — the practice of instant, irrevocable triple talaq — was unconstitutional. Justice Nariman and Justice Lalit struck it down as manifestly arbitrary under Article 14. Justice Kurian Joseph struck it down on Islamic theological grounds. Chief Justice Khehar and Justice Nazeer would have left the practice to legislative reform. A digest of the bench, the three operative positions, the doctrine on manifest arbitrariness, and the subsequent Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act, 2019.
On 11 March 1994, a nine-judge Constitution Bench delivered the most consequential federalism ruling of the post-Kesavananda generation. The judgment held that the President's proclamation under Article 356 imposing President's Rule in a State is subject to judicial review; that secularism is part of the basic structure of the Constitution; that the dissolution of a State Legislative Assembly cannot precede Parliament's approval of the proclamation; and that a State Government that fails to act in accordance with the secular character of the Constitution can, on appropriate facts, be dismissed. A digest of the bench, the doctrinal holdings, and the architecture they leave.
On 1 August 2024, a seven-judge Constitution Bench held by 6:1 that sub-classification within Scheduled Castes for reservation purposes is constitutionally permissible — and overruled E.V. Chinnaiah v. State of Andhra Pradesh (2004), which had held that the Scheduled Castes constituted a homogeneous class. The judgment recalibrates the Indra Sawhney – M. Nagaraj – Jarnail Singh line on reservation and opens the door to sub-quotas within SC reservation for the most disadvantaged sub-groups, subject to empirical data and constitutional safeguards. A digest of the bench, the opinions, the overruling of E.V. Chinnaiah, and what States can now do.
On 17 February 2010, a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court — Balakrishnan CJ, Raveendran, D.K. Jain (authoring for the unanimous Bench), Sathasivam and Panchal JJ — held that the writ jurisdiction of the High Courts under Article 226 and of the Supreme Court under Article 32 is plenary and constitutional, and that a High Court may direct the Central Bureau of Investigation to investigate a cognisable offence within a State even without the State's consent under Section 6 of the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act 1946. Judicial review is part of the basic structure; the constitutional power cannot be fettered by ordinary legislation. But the power is to be exercised sparingly and in exceptional cases, to preserve federal balance. A close reading of the judgment, the underlying Garbeta incident, and the federalism architecture the Bench was working through.
On 6 September 2022 a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court, in State Tax Officer (1) v. Rainbow Papers Ltd, read Section 48 of the Gujarat Value Added Tax Act 2003 — which creates a first charge on the dealer's property in respect of VAT dues — as creating a 'security interest' by operation of law within Section 3(31) of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, with the consequence that the State became a 'secured creditor' under Section 3(30) and a resolution plan that wholly ignored the statutory dues was non-compliant with Section 30(2). A coordinate bench in Paschimanchal Vidyut Vitran Nigam v. Raman Ispat then confined the holding to its facts. A close reading of the GVAT-IBC architecture, the Section 53 waterfall analysis, the doctrinal arc that has followed, and what practitioners advising resolution applicants and statutory authorities should take from the case.
On 26 August 2022 a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, in Sundaresh Bhatt, Liquidator of ABG Shipyard v. Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs, held that once a moratorium is imposed under Section 14 or Section 33(5) of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, the Customs Act yields to the IBC by force of Section 238. The Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs retains the power to assess and determine the quantum of customs duty payable, but cannot initiate recovery, sale or confiscation of the corporate debtor's goods during the moratorium; the customs claim must be filed before the IRP or liquidator and ranks in the Section 53 waterfall. A close reading of Chief Justice Ramana's judgment, the spheres-of-operation reasoning and the doctrinal arc through Paschimanchal.
On 25 January 2019 a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court upheld the *Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code 2016* in its entirety against a battery of Article 14, Article 19(1)(g) and Article 300A challenges. The judgment installed an intelligible-differentia rationale for the financial-creditor / operational-creditor distinction, read down *Section 29A* to confine its sweep to specified categories of ineligible resolution applicants, and directed practical fixes to the *NCLT / NCLAT* tribunal architecture including circuit benches. The 'defaulter's paradise is lost' framing has organised the post-2019 narrative on the Code's transformative purpose.
On 26 March 2021, a three-judge Bench of the Supreme Court set aside the NCLAT's reinstatement of Cyrus Mistry as Executive Chairman of Tata Sons and read down its order recasting Article 75 of the Tata Sons Articles of Association. The judgment delivers two doctrinal resets: a removal from the Board — even of a director nominated by a significant minority shareholder — does not by itself amount to oppression under Sections 241 and 242 of the Companies Act, 2013; and Articles of Association are not per se invalid merely because they confer powers that could potentially be exercised oppressively. The challenge, the Court held, must be to the exercise of the power, not to its existence.
On 15 January 2026, a two-judge bench — Justice R. Mahadevan in the principal opinion, with Justice J.B. Pardiwala concurring — held that the General Anti-Avoidance Rule in Chapter X-A of the *Income-tax Act, 1961* applies to any arrangement yielding a tax benefit on or after 1 April 2017, even for pre-2017 investments structured to claim Mauritius treaty benefits. The Tax Residency Certificate, the Court held, remains a relevant factor but is no longer conclusive for GAAR purposes; the *Azadi Bachao Andolan* line on TRC-as-conclusive-evidence is substantially modified. A digest of the holding, the 2016 Protocol grandfathering architecture, and the practitioner fallout that has emerged through May-June 2026.
On 31 October 2002 an eleven-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court, in T.M.A. Pai Foundation v. State of Karnataka, comprehensively re-stated the law on educational institutions in India — recognising the right to establish and administer an institution as an occupation under Article 19(1)(g), settling the State-wise determination of minority status, drawing the four-fold aided/unaided × minority/non-minority typology that still governs the field, overruling the free-seats/payment-seats scheme of Unni Krishnan as applied to private unaided institutions, and reading down the rigid 50% cap of St. Stephen's College on minority preference. A close reading of Chief Justice Kirpal's majority, the five separate opinions, the partial dissents of Quadri J and Ruma Pal J on the Article 29(2)/30(1) interaction, and the doctrinal arc through Islamic Academy, Inamdar, the 93rd Amendment and the RTE Act.
On 14 December 2017 a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court, in Toyota Jidosha Kabushiki Kaisha v. M/S Prius Auto Industries Ltd, affirmed the Delhi High Court Division Bench's reversal of an ad-interim injunction in favour of Toyota and dismissed Toyota's appeal. The judgment, authored by Justice Ranjan Gogoi for himself and Justice Navin Sinha, holds that trans-border reputation under Indian passing-off law is governed by the territoriality principle — a foreign mark must demonstrate substantial spillover goodwill in Indian territory at the relevant date, here April 2001, and the classical trinity of goodwill, misrepresentation and damage applies even where the mark is globally famous. The judgment reads down Whirlpool (1996) and Milmet Oftho (2004) without overruling them and aligns Indian law with the English Starbucks (HK) approach. A close reading of the judgment's procedural posture, the territoriality holding, and what practitioners should plead in trans-border reputation suits.
On 3 July 2017 a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, in TRF Ltd v. Energo Engineering Projects Ltd, held that where an arbitration clause authorises the Managing Director of a party to act as sole arbitrator or to nominate one, and that MD is statutorily ineligible under Section 12(5) read with the Seventh Schedule of the Arbitration & Conciliation Act, 1996, the MD cannot act as arbitrator and equally cannot nominate a substitute — 'once the infrastructure collapses, the superstructure is bound to collapse.' A close reading of Justice Dipak Misra's judgment, the doctrinal architecture, the 2015 Amendment background and what the holding seeded for Perkins Eastman and Central Organisation for Railway Electrification.
On 16 May 2025, a Supreme Court bench of Justices A.S. Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan struck down the 2017 Notification and the 2021 Office Memorandum that had enabled ex post facto environmental clearances, holding that retrospective approval was foreign to the architecture of Indian environmental regulation. On 18 November 2025, a different bench led by Chief Justice B.R. Gavai — sitting with Justice K. Vinod Chandran and Justice Bhuyan — recalled that judgment by 2:1, with Bhuyan J. now in dissent. A digest of both judgments, the doctrinal disagreement, and what the environmental-clearance architecture now looks like.
On 12 July 2022 a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court, in Vidarbha Industries Power Ltd v. Axis Bank Ltd, read the word 'may' in Section 7(5)(a) of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code as conferring discretion on the adjudicating authority to refuse admission of an otherwise-eligible Section 7 application — an apparent dilution of the Innoventive 'mandatory-admission-on-proof-of-debt-and-default' rule. The reception was sharp; the review was dismissed; a coordinate bench in Maganlal Daga flagged the inconsistency; and a coordinate bench in M. Suresh Kumar Reddy v. Canara Bank confined Vidarbha to its facts. A close reading of the textual contrast between Sections 7(5)(a) and 9(5)(a), the APTEL-award factual matrix, and the doctrinal arc that has, in operational terms, restored Innoventive to its place.
On 14 December 2020 a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, in Vidya Drolia v. Durga Trading Corporation, restated and tightened the in rem / in personam taxonomy of Booz Allen into a structured four-fold test for non-arbitrability, held tenancy disputes under the Transfer of Property Act arbitrable, overruled N. Radhakrishnan on the arbitrability of fraud, and recalibrated the standard of judicial review under Sections 8 and 11 in favour of competence-competence. A close reading of Justice Sanjiv Khanna's lead judgment, Justice Ramana's concurring opinion, the doctrinal architecture and what the bar should plead in the post-Vidya Drolia world.
On 27 July 2022, a three-judge bench led by Justice A.M. Khanwilkar upheld substantially all the contested provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 — the arrest power under Section 19, the provisional attachment power under Section 5, the search-and-seizure architecture under Section 17, the reverse-burden provision under Section 24, and the twin bail conditions under Section 45. The judgment also held that an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR) is not equivalent to an FIR and need not be supplied to the accused. A digest of the holdings, the doctrinal contributions, and the review now pending.
On 18 December 1997 a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice J.S. Verma, hearing the Jain hawala public interest litigation, issued a set of structural directions to insulate the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Enforcement Directorate from executive interference. The judgment fixed a two-year tenure for the CBI Director, gave the Central Vigilance Commission statutory status, struck down the 'Single Directive', and operationalised continuing mandamus as a tool of monitored investigation. It is the foundational case in modern Indian PIL practice.
On 20 January 2012, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court — S.H. Kapadia C.J., K.S. Radhakrishnan J. and Swatanter Kumar J. — unanimously held that the transfer of a single share in a Cayman Islands holding company (CGP) between two non-residents did not give rise to capital gains taxable in India under Section 9(1)(i) of the Income-tax Act, 1961, even though the share's value was rooted in the Hutch–Vodafone Indian telecom chain; the look-at test was adopted, and the Revenue's USD 2.2 billion demand was quashed. Parliament responded with the Finance Act 2012 retrospective amendment to Section 9(1)(i); Vodafone then commenced a treaty arbitration under the India–Netherlands BIT and prevailed; the Taxation Laws (Amendment) Act 2021 ultimately rolled back the retrospective amendment. A digest of the judgment, its statutory architecture, and the doctrinal arc that has followed.
Across a tightly-packed cluster of orders in early 2026 — Swami Ramdev in February, Shashi Tharoor and Sunil Gavaskar in May, and most recently Naga Chaitanya on 29 May — the Delhi High Court has developed a consistent doctrinal architecture for protecting personality rights against AI-generated deepfakes. A digest of the lead Naga Chaitanya order before Justice Jyoti Singh, the dynamic-injunction device that runs through the cluster, the doctrinal continuity with the earlier Varun Dhawan disposition, and the limiting principles the Court has begun to articulate.
On 15 January 2026, a Supreme Court bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan held in Elegna Co-operative Housing Society v. Edelweiss ARC that once a financial debt and default are established, admission under Section 7 of the IBC is mandatory — viability, prejudice to homebuyers, and creditor motive are wholly extraneous. A digest of the disposition, the doctrinal lineage from Innoventive through Vidarbha to M. Suresh Kumar Reddy, and what the homebuyer locus question looks like after Elegna and the companion Mansi Brar Fernandes line.
On 21 November 2025, the Supreme Court stayed proceedings in GR Infra Projects Ltd. v. State of Madhya Pradesh, prima facie holding that a show-cause notice under Section 74 of the CGST Act that sets out only figures, without a factual narration of fraud, wilful misstatement or suppression, is legally deficient. The order has shaped the High Court line on Section 74 and, by extension, on Section 74A — which now governs the extended-limitation regime from 1 April 2024 — and reaffirms the jurisdictional-fact doctrine for the extended-limitation framework.
On 2 April 2026, a Supreme Court bench of Justices P.S. Narasimha and Alok Aradhe held in Rajiv Gaddh v. Subodh Parkash that a subsequent application under Section 11(6) of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 — based on the same cause of action as one already abandoned — is barred on the principles contained in Order 23 Rule 1 of the Code of Civil Procedure. A digest of the ruling, the facts that drove it, the doctrinal extension into the appointment stage, and what it tells practitioners about strategy and abandonment.
On 11 March 2026, a Supreme Court bench of Justices Rajesh Bindal and Vijay Bishnoi held in M. Thanigivelu v. Tamil Nadu Electricity Board that training is part of the service for the purposes of seniority — and that an administrative Board Proceeding cannot retrospectively re-date the seniority of direct recruits to align them with promotees. The judgment restates a longstanding service-jurisprudence principle in the language of the TNEB Service Regulations and clarifies the limits on the State employer's discretion to reorder service hierarchies through administrative instruments.
Valkya Editorial··8 min
Landmark JudgmentSecurities and Exchange Board of India / Securities Appellate Tribunal
On 28 April 2026, SEBI passed a final order in the long-running Winsome Yarns GDR matter against Arun Panchariya, recomputing the penalty from approximately ₹67 crore to ₹20 lakh after the Securities Appellate Tribunal had repeatedly directed reassessment on proportionality grounds. The order is a worked example of how SAT's proportionality jurisprudence — the requirement that penalty quantum reflect comparable precedents, the role of mitigation evidence, and the limits on penalty when gains are not conclusively established — operates in the GDR-fraud space.
The Supreme Court's 2014 ruling that arrest in offences carrying up to seven years is not a clerical reflex — and the checklist its bench wrote into the working life of every station-house officer. A close digest, with the directions verbatim and a reading on how they travel onto BNSS s. 35.
After nineteen years and three rounds of regulatory and tribunal scrutiny, the Supreme Court has set aside SEBI's fraud finding against Reliance Industries on the 2007 RPL trades — and ordered SEBI to refund the ₹250 crore the company had already deposited. A close reading of the disposal, what survives, and why the case will be cited for years on the question of disgorgement standards.
On 29 May 2026, a Bench led by the Chief Justice issued the most prescriptive set of timeline directions ever placed on the High Courts in relation to pronouncing reserved judgments. A close reading of the directions, the escalation mechanism, and what they mean for the litigant on the other side of a reserved order.
Justice Jyoti Singh of the Delhi High Court has indicated that the court will pass an interim order protecting Bollywood actor Varun Dhawan's personality rights against unauthorised exploitation — including AI-generated deepfakes, morphed images, pornographic content, and unauthorised merchandise. The disposition is part of a developing 2026 line of Delhi High Court personality-rights jurisprudence covering Hrithik Roshan, Ajay Devgn and others. A digest of the doctrinal architecture, the AI dimension, and what the framework now looks like.
The 1996 ruling that converted custodial protection from constitutional aspiration into station-house procedure — and the eleven directions that still govern every arrest in India, now carried over into Section 35 BNSS and beyond. A practitioner's digest.
The 28 May 2026 judgment upholding the 28% GST levy on online money gaming, fantasy sports and casinos is the largest indirect-tax ruling in India in a generation — and the reasoning is more interesting than the outcome. A digest of the actionable-claims doctrine, the rejection of the skill-versus-chance test, and what survives for the practitioner advising in this space.
Bhagwati J.'s 1979 directions ordered the release of thousands of undertrials who had been in custody longer than the sentence the offence carried — and, in doing so, read speedy trial into Article 21. A close digest of the reasoning, with a reading on how it now constrains pre-trial detention under the BNSS.
On 26 May 2026, the Supreme Court held that a party who participates in arbitral proceedings after the arbitrator's mandate has expired — without objection — cannot later challenge the award on the ground of expired mandate. A close reading of the doctrine, its interaction with the Court's earlier 2026 rulings on Section 29A, and what it means for the practitioner advising on tribunal continuity.
How a passport-impoundment order led a seven-judge Bench to overrule Gopalan, fuse Articles 14, 19 and 21 into the golden triangle, and import substantive fairness into Indian constitutional law — the most consequential constitutional ruling of the post-Emergency era.
A short judgment with a long reach. When the appellate court reverses an acquittal and finds the accused guilty for the first time, Section 386(a) CrPC requires it to itself hear the convict on sentence — not remit the matter to the trial court. A reading of the doctrinal point, the section it turns on, and how the rule travels onto BNSS Section 427.
A five-judge Bench in 1962 upheld Section 124A IPC, but only by reading into it the limitation that has governed sedition prosecutions ever since. Six decades on, with the offence re-housed as Section 152 BNS, the Kedar Nath gloss remains the doctrinal floor — and the live question is whether the rewrite preserves or alters it.
A three-judge Bench in 2014 overruled the looser reading of Section 65B that had governed electronic-evidence admissibility for nine years, and held that a certificate under sub-section (4) is a condition precedent. The reasoning, the overruling of *Navjot Sandhu*, and the question of how the doctrine now travels onto Section 63 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam.
Six years after Anvar P.V., the three-judge Bench of Nariman, Bhat and Ramasubramanian JJ. returned to Section 65B — to settle a doctrinal drift that had crept in through *Shafhi Mohammad* and to clarify the certificate framework at the boundaries. A digest of the holding, the relaxation that wasn't, and how the framework now travels onto Section 63 BSA.
On 24 August 2017, a nine-judge Bench of the Supreme Court held — without dissent, in 547 pages across six opinions — that the right to privacy is protected as a fundamental right under Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution. The judgment overruled M.P. Sharma (1954) and Kharak Singh (1962) in significant part, and supplied the three-prong proportionality test for state action affecting privacy. A close digest.
In the absence of a domestic statute on workplace sexual harassment, a three-judge Bench led by Chief Justice Verma framed guidelines drawn from India's international obligations and made them binding by direction. The guidelines governed for sixteen years until the 2013 POSH Act codified them. A digest of the doctrinal move, the guidelines themselves, and the relationship between the judgment and the statute it inspired.
A five-judge Constitution Bench in 1980 upheld the constitutional validity of the death penalty by a 4:1 majority, with Bhagwati J. delivering a powerful dissent two years later. The Sarkaria J. majority opinion gave the bar the 'rarest of rare' doctrine, the special-reasons requirement under Section 354(3) CrPC, and the doctrinal architecture of the pre-sentence hearing under Section 235(2) — the framework that anchors every contemporary sentencing appeal.
Valkya Editorial··10 min
Landmark JudgmentNational Company Law Appellate Tribunal, Principal Bench, New Delhi
On 4 May 2026, the NCLAT Principal Bench set aside an NCLT order from December 2025 that had admitted Embassy Developments Limited into CIRP — and closed the insolvency proceedings in their entirety. A digest of the disposal, the institutional posture it signals, and what it means for promoters fighting Section 7 / Section 9 admission at the threshold.
On 5 May 2010, a three-judge Bench held that the involuntary administration of narco-analysis, polygraph and Brain Electrical Activation Profile tests violates the right against self-incrimination under Article 20(3) and the right to personal liberty under Article 21. The judgment extended the Article 20(3) protection from spoken or written testimony to involuntary extraction of personal knowledge from the mind. A digest of the doctrinal architecture, the consent framework, and how it now travels onto BSA s. 51.
On 6 September 2018, a five-judge Constitution Bench unanimously read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in so far as it criminalised consensual sexual conduct between adults. The judgment overruled Suresh Kumar Koushal (2013), deployed the Puttaswamy privacy framework, and supplied four substantial concurring opinions on dignity, equality and constitutional morality. A digest of the holding, the reasoning, and the doctrinal lineage.
On 27 September 2018 — three weeks after Navtej Singh Johar — a five-judge Constitution Bench unanimously struck down Section 497 IPC, the colonial-era adultery provision that had treated the wife as the husband's property and the consenting adulterer as a thief of marital chastity. Four concurring opinions deployed the dignity and equality framework to dismantle a provision that had survived more than a century and a half of constitutional silence. A digest of the holding, the doctrinal architecture, and the relationship with the BNS framework.
On 15 April 2014, a two-judge Bench of the Supreme Court recognised transgender persons as the 'third gender,' upheld the right of all persons to self-identify their gender on the basis of psychological identity rather than biological assignment, and held that transgender persons are entitled to fundamental rights under Articles 14, 15, 16, 19(1)(a) and 21. A digest of the holding, the directions, the Sex Reassignment Surgery question, and the doctrinal architecture that *Puttaswamy* and *Navtej Singh Johar* would subsequently build on.
On 9 March 2018, a five-judge Constitution Bench unanimously held that the right to die with dignity is part of the right to life under Article 21, legalised passive euthanasia, and recognised the Advance Medical Directive (the 'living will') as the procedural mechanism through which an individual's end-of-life preferences could be honoured. The judgment is the foundational architecture of end-of-life law in India. A digest of the holding, the procedural framework, and the 2023 simplification that followed.
On 28 August 1996, a three-judge Bench led by Justice Kuldip Singh held that 'sustainable development', the 'precautionary principle' and the 'polluter pays' principle are part of the law of the land — and ordered the discharge of pollution fees by tanneries in Tamil Nadu that had contaminated the River Palar and rendered 35,000 hectares of agricultural land unfit for cultivation. The judgment, together with *M.C. Mehta (Oleum Gas Leak)*, supplies the foundational architecture of Indian environmental law. A digest of the doctrines, the directions, and what they require.
Less than a year after the Bhopal disaster, an oleum gas leak from a Shriram unit in Delhi prompted the Supreme Court — through a Constitution Bench led by Bhagwati CJ — to depart from the English strict-liability framework of Rylands v. Fletcher and to formulate a doctrine of absolute liability for enterprises engaged in hazardous activities. The judgment is the doctrinal foundation of Indian environmental and industrial liability law. A digest of the rule, why the Court declined to apply Rylands, and how the doctrine continues to operate four decades on.
On 16 November 1992, a nine-judge Constitution Bench upheld the implementation of the Mandal Commission's recommendation for 27% reservation in Central Government services for Other Backward Classes — but bounded the framework with two structural constraints: reservations could not, in the aggregate, exceed 50% of available positions, and the 'creamy layer' of the backward class had to be excluded from the benefit. Three decades on, the framework remains the constitutional architecture of Indian reservations policy. A digest of the holding, the doctrinal architecture, and how it continues to govern.
Seven years before *Common Cause* would articulate the comprehensive constitutional framework, *Aruna Shanbaug* recognised passive euthanasia in Indian law for the first time. The 2011 disposition — addressing a petition seeking withdrawal of life support for a nurse who had been in a persistent vegetative state for nearly four decades following a brutal sexual assault — supplied the doctrinal architecture that *Common Cause* would later complete. A digest of the case, the holding, and the relationship between the two judgments.
On 13 May 2016, a two-judge Bench led by Justice Dipak Misra upheld the constitutional validity of Sections 499 and 500 of the Indian Penal Code — the criminal-defamation framework — against challenges based on the freedom of speech and expression. The reasoning rested on the proposition that reputation is constitutionally protected under Article 21, and that the criminal-defamation framework, properly construed, does not produce an undue chilling effect on expression. A digest of the holding, the doctrinal architecture, and the contemporary practitioner's framework.
On 19 October 2006, a five-judge Constitution Bench upheld the constitutional validity of the 77th, 81st, 82nd and 85th Amendments — which together had inserted Articles 16(4A) and 16(4B) to provide for reservation in promotion for SC/ST and the carry-forward of unfilled reserved positions. The disposition articulated the three-pronged test that has governed promotion-reservation policy ever since: backwardness, inadequacy of representation, and administrative efficiency. A digest of the holding, the three-prong architecture, and the relationship with the *Indra Sawhney* and *Jarnail Singh* lines.
On 23 April 1985, a five-judge Constitution Bench led by Chief Justice Y.V. Chandrachud held that Section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure — the secular maintenance framework — applies to Muslim women, and that the right to maintenance does not end with the iddat period where the divorced wife is unable to support herself. The judgment's substantive disposition was reversed by the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986; the constitutional architecture it articulated, however, has continued to govern subsequent engagement with the question. A digest of the holding, the reasoning, and the doctrinal trajectory.
On 6 March 2020, a five-judge Constitution Bench overruled *Pune Municipal Corporation v. Harakchand Misirimal Solanki* (2014) and substantially restructured the doctrinal architecture under Section 24(2) of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013. The substantive reading: 'or' between possession and compensation in Section 24(2) is to be read as 'nor' — the deemed lapse of acquisition proceedings requires that both conditions be unmet, not just one. A digest of the holding, the doctrinal architecture, and the substantive implications for land-acquisition practice.
On 17 October 2023, a five-judge Constitution Bench unanimously declined to recognise a fundamental right to marry for queer persons under the constitutional framework, and declined to read down the Special Marriage Act, 1954 to extend its substantive marriage architecture to same-sex couples. A 3:2 split on the civil-union question — Chief Justice Chandrachud and Justice Kaul supporting a civil-union framework; the majority declining — produced the disposition's most substantively contested doctrinal dimension. A digest of the holding, the doctrinal architecture, and the relationship with the *NALSA* and *Navtej* lines.
On 8 March 2018, a three-judge Bench of the Supreme Court — Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice A.M. Khanwilkar, and Justice D.Y. Chandrachud — set aside the Kerala High Court's annulment of Hadiya's marriage and reaffirmed the constitutional protection of an adult's right to choose her faith and her life partner. The substantive disposition engaged the constitutional architecture of autonomy, identity, and personal liberty, and articulated doctrinal contributions that have anchored subsequent engagement with the right to choose. A digest of the holding, the doctrinal architecture, and the broader trajectory.
A clean NCLAT ruling on a question that had been quietly bedeviling resolution professionals across the country: can the EPFO continue assessment proceedings during a moratorium under Section 14 of the IBC? The Tribunal has held that it cannot — and that an assessment order passed during CIRP is, accordingly, unenforceable against the corporate debtor.
Valkya Editorial··8 min
Landmark JudgmentNational Company Law Appellate Tribunal, Principal Bench, New Delhi
After a judicial member of the NCLAT Chennai bench recused himself in August 2025 — disclosing an attempt to influence the order through a former High Court judge — the matter went to the Principal Bench under the Supreme Court's directions. On 23 March 2026, the Principal Bench under Chairperson Ashok Bhushan, J. set aside the insolvency proceedings and imposed ₹10 lakh costs on the operational creditor. A short but consequential disposition.
A Division Bench of the Karnataka High Court — Justice D.K. Singh and Justice T.M. Nadaf — has held that the Chief Minister's Office should not directly entertain or interfere in transfer and posting decisions for government and public-undertaking employees. The substantive direction: no transfer request for Group B or C employees should be entertained by the CMO; the matter should end at the department level. The doctrinal architecture engages the separation-of-functions principle that has been developing in Indian administrative law, the constitutional protection of merit and integrity in public administration, and the practical concern that political-office interference in routine personnel decisions distorts both administration and democratic accountability.
On 17 March 2026, the Competition Commission of India closed a complaint against Roppen Transportation (Rapido) over alleged use of private (white-plate) vehicles in its bike-taxi service. The Commission's reasoning was jurisdictional: the dispute fell within the specialised framework of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, and not within the Commission's competition-law jurisdiction. A digest of the order, the jurisdictional doctrine, and what it reveals about the Commission's posture on overlap with sectoral regulation.
Two airlines control nearly 90% of the Indian domestic aviation market. A complainant alleged that their identical cancellation-charge structures were anti-competitive — collusion under Section 3, abuse of dominance under Section 4, or both. The Competition Commission of India closed the matter under Section 26(2) on the ground that no prima facie case had been made out. A digest of the reasoning, the threshold standard, and what the disposition reveals about the CCI's contemporary posture in consumer-pricing complaints.
The withdrawal mechanism under Section 12A of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code was Parliament's compromise between commercial pragmatism and statutory discipline — a structured route for settlement during CIRP. The NCLAT has, in a line of 2026 decisions including Gokul Aggarwal v. Bank of India, held that the route closes when liquidation commences. A digest of the doctrinal architecture, the line of cases, and what it means for the settlement-exit practice that had grown up around the section.
On 10 March 2026, a learned single judge of the Bombay High Court closed a gap that had quietly opened up in Indian arbitration practice: whether a foreign award-creditor who has filed an enforcement petition under Part II loses access to interim relief under Section 9. The judgment is short, the holding is precise, and the practitioner's takeaway is operational.
Valkya Editorial··8 min
Landmark JudgmentNational Company Law Appellate Tribunal, Principal Bench, New Delhi
The NCLAT has held that the demand notice in Form B prescribed under the 2019 Rules cannot, by itself, constitute invocation of a personal guarantee. A Section 95 IBC application against a personal guarantor without prior contractual invocation is not maintainable. The NCLAT went further: it directed that the conduct of UCO Bank officials in filing the application without invocation be brought to the attention of the bank's Chairman. A digest of the doctrinal point, the procedural architecture, and what it means for personal-guarantor practice.
The Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court has held that the investigating officer's discretion to sponsor a witness for recording of statement under Section 183 BNSS — the successor to Section 164 CrPC — is not displaced by a party's request. The investigating agency cannot be compelled to record the statement of a particular witness. A digest of the section, the holding, and what it means for the criminal-investigation framework under the BNSS.
A Division Bench of the Allahabad High Court has reaffirmed that a conviction recorded against a juvenile under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act cannot operate as a disqualification for appointment to government or public services. The reasoning engages the rehabilitation-and-reintegration principle that anchors the entire JJ Act framework, and the constitutional protection of privacy and dignity that follows the *Puttaswamy* line. A digest of the doctrinal architecture, the bench's directions, and its relationship with the broader 'right to be forgotten' jurisprudence.
Section 482 of the BNSS replaced Section 438 of the CrPC on 1 July 2024, but did so without reproducing the statutory guiding factors — nature of accusation, antecedents, possibility of fleeing — that the CrPC had attached. A reading of the Chhattisgarh High Court's diagnosis of what this means for the anticipatory-bail discretion, and how trial courts and the bar should approach the post-BNSS framework.
Section 69 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita criminalises sexual intercourse obtained by deceitful means — including a false promise to marry. A lawyer's PIL before the Kerala High Court argues that the provision violates Articles 14, 15(1), 19(1)(a) and 21 — that it presupposes male-only power, fails to extend protection to the LGBTQIA+ community, and treats women as objects of patriarchal protection rather than autonomous adults. The High Court has issued notice to the Centre. A digest of the section, the constitutional arguments, and what the challenge will turn on.
A 74-year-old man, diagnosed with Alzheimer's dementia, was facing prosecution under the Prevention of Corruption Act. Justice K. Babu of the Kerala High Court held that the wider protection in the BNSS for accused suffering from intellectual disability — including dementia — applies retrospectively to proceedings initiated before 1 July 2024. A digest of the doctrinal point, the BNSS / CrPC comparison, and its reach.