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.
Land Acquisition Appeal · 2026:DHC:8039
Deadlines for filing appeals matter, and courts are unlikely to excuse very long, poorly-explained delays. A litigant who accepts a particular valuation or benchmark at the trial stage, without presenting evidence to the contrary, will generally not be allowed to seek a better outcome later on appeal.
Civil Miscellaneous (Main) Petition · 2026:DHC:8010
Even a short delay in responding to a summary suit can nearly cost a person their right to defend themselves in court. Even so, courts will usually give a genuine, honestly-explained short delay the benefit of the doubt rather than shutting the door entirely, especially when doing so avoids a decree being passed without a hearing on the actual merits.
Criminal Appeal · 2026:DHC:7989-DB
A conviction cannot rest on the "last seen together" circumstance alone, however suspicious it looks. The prosecution must build a complete, gap-free chain of evidence that leaves no reasonable possibility of innocence, and any genuine doubt must benefit the accused, not the prosecution.
Writ Petition (Civil) · 2026:DHC:8044
An employer, including a government body, cannot dismiss even a daily-wage or temporary worker as punishment for alleged wrongdoing without first giving them a fair, formal inquiry with a real chance to defend themselves; skipping that step can make the termination illegal regardless of how the employer labels it.
Regular Second Appeal · 2026:DHC:8003
When a special law like the Electricity Act sets up its own dedicated authority to resolve a particular type of dispute (here, compensation for unauthorised power lines), ordinary civil courts generally cannot step in even if the other side's conduct was clearly improper. The aggrieved person must go to that specific authority (District Magistrate/Police Commissioner) instead, and must also be ready to prove the actual amount of loss suffered, not just assert a claim.
First Appeal from Order · 2026:DHC:8047
A long gap between a person's death and a Will being taken to court for probate is not automatically suspicious if there's a reasonable family explanation for it; and a party who repeatedly fails to use the opportunities a court gives them to produce evidence cannot expect a second chance for the same evidence at the appeal stage.
Criminal Miscellaneous Case · 2026:DHC:8035
Where a genuine compromise is reached in a case involving non-serious, personal-dispute offences, courts can quash the FIR to spare both sides a lengthy trial, but only after the judge is personally satisfied that the settlement is voluntary and genuine, not merely on paper.
Writ Petition (Civil) · 2026:DHC:7977-DB
Being investigated twice over GST credit from the same supplier is not automatically illegal. The "same subject matter" protection only kicks in when both proceedings target the exact same contravention, so a genuine fraud probe can run independently of an earlier routine tax assessment.
Regular First Appeal · 2026:DHC:8014
In Indian property law, being physically absent from a jointly-inherited property does not by itself strip a family co-owner of their rightful share. The other occupants must prove they treated the absent owner as clearly and knowingly excluded, not just that they lived there without them.
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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.
C.A. Nos.-006178-006179 - 2025 (arising out of S.L.P.(C) Nos. 15336-15337 of 2021, along with a batch of connected appeals)
This case arose from a dispute between Gayatri Balasamy and her former employer, ISG Novasoft Technologies, that had gone to arbitration and produced an award later challenged in court. Because previous Supreme Court benches had given conflicting answers on a recurring and important question, whether a court reviewing an arbitral award under Sections 34 and 37 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 can modify the award, or can only set it aside: a three-judge bench referred the question to the Chief Justice, who in turn constituted this five-judge Constitution Bench to settle the law once and for all.
By a 4:1 majority, the Court held that Sections 34 and 37 courts do have a limited power to modify an arbitral award, though not a general appellate power to review it on its merits. This limited power applies in four situations: (i) severing and setting aside only the "invalid" portion of an award where it is separable from the valid part; (ii) correcting clerical, computational, or typographical errors that are obvious on the face of the record; (iii) modifying post-award interest in appropriate circumstances; and (iv) invoking the Supreme Court's special Article 142 "complete justice" power, used sparingly and never to rewrite an award's merits. Justice K.V. Viswanathan dissented, holding that the earlier ruling in Project Director, NHAI v. M. Hakeem (that courts cannot modify awards) was correctly decided, and that only the narrow power to fix clerical or computational errors should be recognised: modification, in his view, is not a "lesser" power contained within the power to set aside, but a fundamentally different one that risks turning courts into appellate bodies over arbitration.
Parties who go to arbitration in India should know that courts reviewing the award can now, in limited and defined situations, tweak or partially fix an award rather than only accepting or scrapping it entirely, but this is a narrow exception, not a licence for courts to re-decide the case on its merits.
