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.
This decades-old batch of tax appeals asked whether a business that purchased goods from a seller who was exempt from sales tax could still be made to pay a separate "purchase tax" under Section 5A of the Kerala Act or Section 7A of the Tamil Nadu Act, when it later used those goods to manufacture other goods or sent them outside the state. Though the old sales-tax regime has since been replaced by VAT and GST, these pending disputes still needed to be resolved under the law as it stood. The appellant-assessees argued that if the seller's sale was exempt from tax, no purchase tax could arise on the same transaction.
The Supreme Court held that purchase tax under these provisions is a separate, independent charge that is deliberately triggered precisely because the seller's sale was tax-exempt: an exemption granted to the seller does not automatically flow through to exempt the purchaser from this distinct tax. Relying on its earlier three-judge decision in State of Tamil Nadu v. M.K. Kandaswami and the later ruling in Hotel Balaji, the Court explained that "goods the sale or purchase of which is liable to tax" refers to the category of taxable goods generally, not whether tax was actually paid on that specific sale, and rejected the contrary view taken in Goodyear India. The Court also upheld the constitutional validity of both provisions and dismissed all the assessees' appeals.
A tax exemption granted to a seller does not automatically extend to exempt the buyer from a separate charge like purchase tax: each taxing provision must be read on its own terms, and businesses cannot assume that one party's tax relief automatically shields the other side of the same transaction.
