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 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.