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 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.
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.
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.