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.
DAMEPL (the appellant) and DMRC (the respondent) had entered a Concession Agreement in 2008 to build and operate the Delhi Airport Metro Express line. After DAMEPL terminated the agreement in 2012 citing DMRC's defaults, an Arbitral Tribunal awarded DAMEPL a Termination Payment of Rs. 2782.33 crore plus interest as per the agreement: an award that, after years of litigation, was ultimately upheld and restored by the Supreme Court in September 2021. When DAMEPL sought to execute the award, a narrow but financially significant dispute arose over whether the "sum" on which post-award interest (at the rate fixed by the award) should be calculated must also include the pre-award interest that had accrued up to the date of the award: a question the Delhi High Court's execution court had answered against DAMEPL.
The Supreme Court held that ordinarily, under Section 31(7) of the Arbitration Act (relying on its earlier ruling in Hyder Consulting v. State of Orissa), the "sum" for calculating post-award interest would indeed include pre-award interest, since the word "sum" is not qualified by "principal" and Parliament deliberately used broader language than in Section 34 CPC. However, Section 31(7)(a) itself begins with "unless otherwise agreed by the parties," and here the Concession Agreement's Article 29.8 specifically fixed the rate and manner of interest on the Termination Payment (SBI PLR plus 2%): an express agreement that displaced the Arbitral Tribunal's general discretion and rendered Hyder Consulting's default reasoning inapplicable to this case. Since the Arbitral Tribunal had already computed and awarded interest strictly per the parties' own contractual formula (and that finding had attained finality in the 2021 judgment), there was no room to further pad the interest calculation, and the Delhi High Court's execution-stage ruling rejecting DAMEPL's larger interest claim was upheld, with the appeal dismissed.
Where parties have specifically agreed in their contract on how interest is to be calculated on a payment, that contractual agreement overrides the arbitration law's default rules on awarding interest: the phrase "unless otherwise agreed by the parties" in Section 31(7) of the Arbitration Act is not a dead letter, and courts will not read general precedent (decided on facts without such an agreement) to override a specific contractual bargain.
