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 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 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.