Real judgements, distilled
Court judgements broken down into the case type, how the decision played out, and the lesson worth remembering, with the full judgement available as a PDF.
Transfer Petition (Criminal) · 2026 INSC 1060
Where a marriage has irretrievably broken down and the parties reach a genuine, voluntary settlement, including on alimony, the Supreme Court can use its Article 142 powers to grant a mutual-consent divorce and close out all related litigation in one stroke, without requiring the usual statutory waiting period.
Writ Petition (Civil) · 2026 INSC 1061
In long-running, complex litigation involving apportioned government liabilities across states, the Supreme Court can use a mechanism like a retired-judge committee plus periodic compliance affidavits to bring genuine finality, including firm timelines, transparency obligations, and interest for delayed payment, rather than leaving matters open-ended.
Civil Appeal · 2026 INSC 1062
In an "as is where is" liquidation auction, a bidder who voluntarily accepts the auction terms cannot later resile from a forfeiture clause by citing regulatory caps or after-the-fact excuses for non-payment: courts will enforce the auction notice's own conditions.
Writ Petition (Criminal) · 2026:DHC:8338-DB
Once someone is released from custody because the police failed to properly communicate the grounds of arrest, the police cannot simply re-arrest them by adding new charges: a specific, court-supervised procedure with senior-officer accountability must be followed, or the re-arrest itself becomes illegal.
Bail Application · 2026:DHC:8308
In economic-offence cases, bail can still be granted where the method used to quantify the alleged financial evasion is not adequately justified, and where the apprehension of re-offending is speculative rather than evidence-based.
Writ Petition (Criminal) · 2026:DHC:8323
A parole claim must be backed by a genuine, verifiable application to the competent jail authority: courts will scrutinise irregularities like an incomplete address, an unexplained thumb mark, or reliance on a mere friend's affidavit rather than close family.
Bail Application · 2026:DHC:8337
Courts can grant short, strictly time-bound interim bail purely on humanitarian/compassionate grounds (such as caring for a seriously ill family member), even while a case remains pending trial and an earlier bail plea has failed.
Bail Application · 2026:DHC:8312
Courts will not repeatedly re-examine a bail plea already rejected on merits unless the applicant can point to a genuine change in circumstances since the earlier order.
First Appeal from Order · 2026:DHC:8334
Under the no-fault compensation scheme for railway accidents, a valid ticket-holder injured while attempting to board a train, even carelessly, is generally entitled to compensation unless the railway can show a deliberate, conscious exposure to danger, not mere negligence.
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Legal Case Shots is a searchable database of Supreme Court of India judgments, each broken down into the case type, the court's key holding, and a practical lesson learnt, with the full judgment available as a PDF for citation or deeper reading.
Diebold Systems supplied, installed and commissioned ATMs for banks under turnkey contracts for a single composite price. The Revenue treated 33% of the total consideration received (for the period July 2003 to April 2006) as attributable to "installation and commissioning" and demanded service tax on that portion, issuing three show-cause notices totalling over Rs. 11 crore. The Tribunal (CESTAT) had ruled in the assessee's favour, holding the contracts were indivisible turnkey contracts that could not be artificially split for taxation, and the Revenue appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court upheld the Tribunal, holding that during the relevant period (before the "works contract service" entry was introduced on 1 June 2007), the Finance Act, 1994 contained neither a charging provision nor a valuation mechanism authorising the Revenue to carve out and tax a notional service component of an indivisible turnkey contract executed for one composite price. Relying on the Constitution Bench ruling in Gannon Dunkerley and the later decision in Larsen & Toubro, the Court held that a taxing statute must expressly authorise vivisection of a composite contract before any part of it can be isolated and taxed; the Revenue's attribution of "33%" to installation had no statutory basis. The introduction of a specific "works contract service" entry with its own valuation machinery in 2007 confirmed that no such power existed earlier.
Tax cannot be levied by administrative guesswork or a notional percentage: a taxing authority can only tax what a specific charging provision actually authorises, and an indivisible composite contract cannot be split into taxable components unless the law expressly permits it.
