In this 2019 decision the Supreme Court restated the material questions a court must answer before decreeing specific performance of a contract to sell immovable property. Decided under the pre-2018 Specific Relief Act, it is a compact guide to what a buyer must plead and prove — a valid concluded contract, continuous readiness and willingness, and an equitable case for the discretionary relief.
Under pre-2018 Section 16(c) of the Specific Relief Act, a buyer must plead and prove continuous readiness and willingness from the date of the agreement to the decree — so fixed deposits created years after the suit, plus an unexplained delay of two years and nine months in filing, defeated the claim for specific performance.
In 1986 the Supreme Court struck down a State company's reasonless-termination clause as void under Section 23 of the Contract Act and arbitrary under Art. 14.
The 1903 Privy Council ruling that a minor is incompetent to contract under Section 11, making the agreement void ab initio and barring recovery of the loan.
U.P. promised new sugar units a three-year sales-tax exemption; Motilal Padampat raised loans and built a plant, then the State resiled. The 1979 ruling on promissory estoppel against the Government.
A 2022 bench held the 2018 Specific Relief Act amendment prospective and disturbed a specific-performance decree; in 2024 the Supreme Court allowed review, restored the High Court's decree on the merits and applied lis pendens, leaving the prospectivity question arguably open.
In 1953 a three-judge bench laid the foundation of Indian frustration doctrine, holding that Section 56 of the Contract Act is a complete code, that 'impossibility' means impracticability striking at the root of the contract, and that a temporary war requisition did not frustrate a no-fixed-time development contract.
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.
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.