The Supreme Court accepted that the correct standard for producing additional documents under Order XI CPC in a commercial suit is 'reasonable cause', not 'sufficient cause' — yet dismissed the appeal, holding that even on that lower threshold there was no justification for a 2023 application to add emails, vendor agreements and server data that were always in the applicant's own possession. The Commercial Courts Act's timelines do not permit a piecemeal approach to evidence, however voluminous the record.
The Delhi High Court held that director disqualification under Section 164(2) of the Companies Act 2013 operates prospectively and arises automatically, without any prior hearing. But it found no statutory basis for the MCA to deactivate the disqualified directors' DINs and DSCs, and ordered them reactivated.
The Delhi High Court held that a common-law derivative action survives in a deadlocked company under the wrongdoer-control exception to Foss v. Harbottle, and that a director who runs a competing business breaches the fiduciary duties codified in Section 166 of the Companies Act, 2013 and must account for the resulting gains.
The Delhi High Court held that the absence of a recognised National Sports Federation for karate cannot deprive athletes of international opportunities, and directed the authorities to evolve an interim selection-and-entry mechanism until a recognised NSF is constituted.
The Delhi High Court held that discharging a probationer while her sexual harassment complaint was pending — in defiance of a no-adverse-action direction — was retaliatory, mala fide and void. It ordered reinstatement with full back wages, and ruled that the Akademi's Secretary is the 'employer' under section 2(g) of the POSH Act, so the Local Committee had jurisdiction.
The Delhi High Court held that protection of possession under Section 53A of the Transfer of Property Act 1882 can be claimed only on a registered agreement to sell, and that persons who entered as tenants cannot convert themselves into owners on an unregistered agreement. A digest of the facts, the holding, and why registration is now decisive.
The Delhi High Court held that a plaintiff who accepts the amount conferred on it under an NCLT-approved resolution plan and then withdraws its connected recovery suit has 'settled' its claim within Section 16 of the Court Fees Act, 1870 — and is entitled to a full refund of court fee. A digest of the facts, the holding, and how the Court extended the M.C. Subramaniam line to the insolvency context.
A Delhi High Court vacation bench dismissed Telegram's challenge to a temporary, nationwide block imposed ahead of the NEET-UG 2026 re-examination. Justice Tejas Karia held that Section 69A of the IT Act lets the Centre block an entire intermediary platform — not merely individual URLs or content — and that the emergency block cleared the proportionality test as the least restrictive measure available.
A single judge of the Delhi High Court vacated an interim stay and refused to restrain the encashment of a USD 10.53 million unconditional performance bank guarantee, holding that a contractor's dispute over the legality of contract termination is no ground to injunct an autonomous guarantee. A digest of the facts, the Section 9 question, and the narrow fraud and special-equities exceptions restated in a cross-border India–Mozambique setting.
In July 2025 a Division Bench of the Delhi High Court revived Crocs' long-stalled enforcement campaign, holding that a common-law passing-off action is maintainable even where the product get-up is itself a registered design. A digest of the facts, the design/trade-dress overlap, and the doctrine's later trajectory through the Supreme Court.
In December 2025 a Division Bench of the Delhi High Court dismissed the Revenue's transfer-pricing appeal, faulting the Dispute Resolution Panel for merely endorsing the Transfer Pricing Officer's conclusions without recording its own findings. A digest of the facts, the statutory duty of the DRP under Section 144C, and why the Court found no substantial question of law.
A single judge of the Delhi High Court has declined to decide, and instead referred to a Larger Bench, a foundational sequencing question under the new BNSS: on a private complaint, must the accused be heard under the first proviso to Section 223(1) before or after the Magistrate examines the complainant on oath. A digest of the facts, the interpretive conflict over when 'cognizance' is taken, and the questions sent up for authoritative resolution.
In April 2025 the Delhi High Court refused to injunct four social-media influencers who reviewed a protein supplement against the maker's defamation and trademark claims. Justice Amit Bansal held that evidence-based product criticism grounded in accredited lab reports is prima facie fair comment and protected free speech, not disparagement.
On 26 May 2025 the Delhi High Court restrained unidentified John Doe defendants from circulating AI-generated deepfake videos that impersonated personal-finance influencer Ankur Warikoo to defraud investors. A digest of the facts, the interim John Doe injunction, and what it signals for personality rights in the age of deepfake scams.
A Delhi High Court Division Bench dismissed the CCI's appeal and held that interest on a competition penalty can run only from default on a validly served demand notice. The judgment ties interest under the 2011 recovery regulations strictly to the Regulation 3 procedure and forecloses retrospective or automatic accrual. A digest of the dry cell batteries cartel facts, the question of when interest begins, and what the ruling means for penalty recovery.
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.
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.
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 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 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 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 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.
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.
The May 2026 cycle in Indian intellectual-property law has produced three doctrinal threads running in parallel — the Division Bench reset of the SEP-evidence architecture in Bansal v. Philips and the parallel pro-tem FRAND security in Malikie v. Xiaomi; the Delhi High Court DB's close-out of the Ilaiyaraaja-Saregama composer-rights line under the pre-1994 Copyright Act architecture; and the Calcutta High Court's first Indian engagement with the generative-AI/IP interface in Indiamart v. OpenAI. Read alongside Syngenta on agrochemical polymorphism and Section 3(d), Orient Electric on Designs Act anticipation discipline, Médecins Sans Frontières on trade-mark use in fictional film content, Indian Explosives on Section 12A pre-institution mediation in copyright suits, Communication Components Antenna on antenna-patent damages quantum, and Ars Steels on procedural fairness at the Designs Controller, the cycle discloses the operational architecture within which Indian IP practice now operates.
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 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.